restoration
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
A couple weeks back, I wrote about an arrangement that enabled a pool to reopen through an unusual partnership between a school and a pool-lacking YMCA (click here). Since then, I've come across another sort of arrangement that will restore an iconic watershape and
Working outdoors in the California sun is typically seen as a desirable perk, especially when, as in this case, the on-site alternative was working below ground in a confined labyrinth of narrow passages with limitless opportunities for banging your head. But here, it's my general sense that the plumbers working below ground on Hearst Castle's Neptune Pool (San Simeon, Calif.) had an easier row to hoe than did the marble applicators working in the open air. For one thing, tasks performed on the interior surface of the pool were
It's not often that an opportunity to work on anything as renowned as the Neptune Pool comes around. Built first as a reflecting pool, transformed into an oval-shaped plunge pool and, as Hearst Castle assumed massive proportions, ultimately finished as a 350,000-gallon swimming pool that's probably the most widely recognized watershape in the world, it's a pleasure just to see it, let alone help preserve it for future generations. We at Terracon, an engineering firm based in Olathe, Kans., came to the project through our acquisition late in 2014 of Rowley International, the aquatic design and engineering company based in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. William Rowley, its principal and a specialist in sophisticated aquatic complexes - and, equally important
The first of this pair of articles mentioned that Julia Morgan had completed the architecture program at Beaux-Arts in Paris in three years rather than the usual five, but I didn't mention all of the circumstances. One of the rules of that institution prohibited the instruction of students after their thirtieth birthdays, which seems a totally bizarre limitation to us now but apparently made sense to French academicians at the turn of the 20th Century. Given the delays in her gaining a position at the school, she'd entered the program with the clock ticking and really had no choice but to
