Masters of Deception: Escher

Meets the Eyes
Although we might not commonly think of watershaping and exterior design in this way, a great many of the details we shape are designed to fool the eye or somehow create illusions.  Consider the pools that are made to appear so natural that they don’t seem to have been man-made – or vanishing edges that conjure the impression that there’s no visual boundary between the surface of a swimming pool and a distant body of water. Those are two familiar tricks of the trade, but if you stop and think about it, there are many less-obvious examples as well:  water flowing under a bridge that leads to nowhere; rocks half buried in the landscape to give the illusion that they are part of a subterranean geological formation; small bits of individual tile that come together to form a mosaic image; or modular walls that appear to float in space. In my own work, to add another example, I’ve started to be deliberate about