hydraulics
It may have been in the heart of the depression, but 1932 was a good year for American swimmers: The Olympic Games in Los Angeles saw Clarence "Buster" Crabbe win gold in the 400-meter freestyle in the then-world-record time of 4:48.2 and Helene Madison win gold medals in both the 100- and 400-meter freestyle events. U.S. swimmers claimed nine medals in all, in many cases besting swimmers from the powerful and heavily favored Japanese team. The competition was held in an eight lane, 50-meter pool positioned quite literally in the shadow of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Just as the names and records of those swimmers have faded across 70-plus years, so too had the swimming pool and its companion recreation pool. Although they had remained in near-continuous use for generations, the old vessels were supplanted when a modern swimming pool complex opened on the nearby campus of the University of Southern California in anticipation of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympiad. Early in 2003, we at Rowley International of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., were asked to renovate the old facility's two swimming pools. The City of Los Angeles, along with support from the Amateur Athletic Federation (AAF), set a goal that didn't involve
The late, great architect John Lautner is believed to have been among the first to conceive of and build a vanishing-edge swimming pool as a means of more directly tying views across the water into distant vistas. It's a landmark of modern aquatic design that has been emulated thousands of times in the 45 years since he designed "Silvertop" in Los Angeles, and it's wonderful to know that his spirit of innovation survives to this day in the company he started. The home and watershapes seen here are the work of Lautner's protégé and longtime collaborator, Helena Arahuete of John Lautner Associates (Hollywood, Calif.), who composed it all as a spectacular exploration of organic design principles and the use of water to express and magnify details of a setting while leading the
The late, great architect John Lautner is believed to have been among the first to conceive of and build a vanishing-edge swimming pool as a means of more directly tying views across the water into distant vistas. It's a landmark of modern aquatic design that has been emulated thousands of times in the 45 years since he designed "Silvertop" in Los Angeles, and it's wonderful to know that his spirit of innovation survives to this day in the company he started. The home and watershapes seen here are the work of Lautner's protégé and longtime collaborator, Helena Arahuete of John Lautner Associates (Hollywood, Calif.), who composed it all as a spectacular exploration of organic design principles and the use of water to express and magnify details of a setting while leading the
We've all heard the phrase "less is more" so often that it's become a cliché, but there are still situations where there is powerful truth in those words. There is no question, for example, that watershapers can create tremendous beauty by using simple shapes and quality materials to accentuate and magnify a setting. This is particularly so when the watershaper exploits the alluring, reflective qualities of water itself to create a strong focal point while effectively blending the vessel into its setting. A case in point is the
Truly a large-scale project full of unique technical challenges in an unusual and important civic setting, the renovation of the watershapes at Jambalaya Park in Gonzalez, La., is easily the most unusual project our firm has ever tackled. The park covers seven beautifully wooded acres in an older section of town that's mostly residential but sits directly behind City Hall and several other smaller civic buildings. It takes its name from the fact that the city is known as the world's "Jambalaya Capital" and annually hosts a week-long festival celebrating the Cajun stew that has become a star in the
Creating granite waterfeatures is not unlike the delicacy of deep-water yacht racing: Racing big boats across the open sea requires intuitive sense in harnessing the raw powers of nature, much as do the creative insights needed to take raw monoliths from quarry walls and produce elegant expressions that reflect our primal essence. Both endeavors must gracefully balance the unbridled forces of nature. In yacht racing, wind and waves must be brought into harmony with a yacht's unique rigging and sails by its skipper and crew. With granite waterfeatures, an innate sense of harmonic balance must be struck between granite and/or water, the landscape and the human observer's ability to appreciate solemnity. In my case, these harmonies have consistently been found in asymmetry. Indeed, I've come to feel confident with the premise that people are, knowingly or not, drawn to the asymmetrical balances they see in nature. I also see both art and architecture as skillful reflections and expressions of what we have observed in nature from time immemorial. To that end, I try to create works that draw their form and spirit from the intuitive balance of asymmetry. Whether sculpting a landscape, setting stones in a rock garden or
When you look at this project in finished form, there's no way to see the months of struggle or the overall level of difficulty that went into its creation. You don't see the fact, for example, that we discovered while excavating the courtyard that the house itself was in imminent danger of collapsing. You don't see that the narrow access way buckled when we first started working, or the ugly trauma of the broken septic tank. You can't see the continuous changes in thought, direction and design that went into the deck, or the tremendous time and effort required to make the
The fire came swiftly, sweeping through the dry, late-summer undergrowth, and the land was quickly blackened and denuded. A month later, the rains came, hard and lashing, and rivulets of water ran down the hillside. Torrents of mud and stone ground away the soil and washed out the base of a tree that happened to be in the way. The tree fell. Branches became splinters on the ground. The noise the tree had made as it fell was intense: a cracking and groaning sound followed by crackles as limbs snapped against still-standing trees. Now it lay there, its roots all but pulled from the ground.Ten years passed, and as the tree's bark rotted, small saplings had begun to grow from its base. The creek ran close by, gurgling and never-ending, its water wending its way among the rocks and other fallen trees toward the ocean just half a mile away. This tree would serve a purpose in its death: In my work as a sculptor, I seek out
It's truly a diamond in the rough: a huge, sparkling blue pool set in the middle of nowhere in a country that is probably best known for being the gateway between two grand oceans. For a time before I arrived on the scene, however, the enormous rectangular swimming pool at Palabra de Vida, a Christian missionary camp in Chame, Panama, was anything but shimmering. The mission operates a camp for the region's underprivileged children, who visit the facility in shifts that stretch across several months each year. There are times when
One advantage of building pools in the affluent Chicago suburb of Lake Forest is that many of our prospects have seen inspiring landscapes, pools and waterfeatures in neighboring backyards or at quality resorts around the world - and, as a result, come to the design process with plenty of ideas. With all of that experience and thoughtful exposure to the possibilities of water, quite often they're already visualizing the way they want their backyards to look. Such was certainly the case with the project seen in this article: The homeowner came to us with an armload of photographs and knew exactly what she wanted from the outset. And the canvas for her imagination was plenty big, with a backyard measuring more than two acres and including a
