project teams

Seats at the Table

In uploading this set of newsletter articles to the WaterShapes database, I was struck by the fact that two of them involve large measures of cross-disciplinary collaboration - in one case between a designer and two skilled contractors, in the other between a pool designer, a home designer and a skilled contractor. As I've spent time these past few weeks thinking about what's happened in the

The circumstances in which urban fountains are created these days is complex and ever-changing, say Robert Mikula and Simon Gardiner -- a situation they discuss in the first of two articles on building a sense of multi-level participation among key groups of stakeholders.

A Sense of Participation

In his 1980 book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William H. Whyte described seven elements needed to make urban spaces successful: seating areas, ready street access, sun, the availability of food, the presence of trees, features that promote conversations among strangers and water - particularly in the form of water features and fountains. As an example of this formulation, there is no more illustrative space than New York's