fountain renovation Archives

Now familiar with the unusual realities of the huge fountain-renovation project they'd undertaken, J. Wickham Zimmerman and Chris Roy had to figure out how to proceed despite difficult access, limited pipe penetrations and, of course, super-high civic expectations.

Grand Solutions

It's the nature of the game: One of the great sources of pride for any good watershaping business has to do with its ability to find solutions to difficult challenges - a new way to achieve something familiar when the established or conventional approach won't work, for example, or dealing with site constraints that repeatedly send you back to the drawing board. That's the sort of pride we had coming out of our work on the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain and its accompanying splash pad at Grand Park in Los Angeles, and it was intensified by the fact that this was the restoration of a 60-year-old fountain that had originally been built with an entirely different approach from anything we'd consider today - but whose physical constraints we couldn't

Approaching the renovation of an historic fountain set over an existing, untouchable structure is daunting enough. But it gets tougher, write J. Wickham Zimmerman and Chris Roy, when the original documentation is sketchy and you have no choice but to figure out how to proceed.

Grand Expectations

With any watershape renovation project, there's a great deal of anticipation of what you'll discover once the system is dismantled to whatever degree or level is necessary. In some cases, all is well and the process of reworking structures and systems unfolds smoothly. In others, however, there are surprises that can take your breath away. This was one of those "other" cases - the restoration of an historic fountain that had been in place since 1958 as well as the upgrading of an adjacent space to accommodate a splash pad for interactive play and provide a stage for