Los Angeles
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
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
As you've probably noticed by now, I'm a big fan of Lawrence Halprin's work. I've probably covered a half-dozen of his projects in Travelogues through the past eight years, and I can easily see myself covering a half-dozen more in installments to come. Halprin is perhaps best known for the muscular, rough-hewn stonework that highlights not only the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., but also the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Ore. Yet his output also featured elegance and a sense of
I’ve spent enough time exploring Los Angeles that I’ve found a few underappreciated gems in my time – at least so far as watershaping is concerned. One of them is Suiho En, the “Garden of Water and Fragrance” – otherwise known as “the Japanese Garden next to the water-treatment plant.” It’s an unusual location for such a contemplative space – six-and-a-half acres of
When I drove to downtown Los Angeles a few months ago to take photographs of Ricardo Legorreta’s glorious purple aqueduct in Pershing Square, I parked a few blocks away in a lot near the civic center. It was a gorgeous day, so I decided to linger a while and take in Grand Park – a large, new green space stretching between
