serenity
EasyPro Pond Products (Grant, MI) has added Serenity as a new color in its line…
As mentioned previously, I've traveled to Seattle with fair frequency through the past few years. Mostly I'm there to visit my mother on Bainbridge Island, but I've also given myself enough time to explore the area that I almost know my way around the city and its many public watershapes. On one trip a couple years back, I took the usual ferry ride from the island back to Seattle on my way to the airport, arriving in plenty of time for a leisurely stroll from the boat terminal to the metro station a few blocks away. My semi-roundabout path took me right by Pioneer Square, a place
Not long ago, I did a pair of columns on healing gardens and their benefits. If you’ll recall, I preached the importance of persuading hospitals in particular to include these spaces in their overall site plans as a means of providing garden environments for patients, patients’ families and hospital staff: These spaces reduce stress, help patients heal more quickly and give everyone who visits them a soothing sense of tranquility. I’ve attempted to the greatest extent possible to practice what I preached, and through the years I’ve installed numerous health-specific gardens at local assisted-living centers, Alzheimer’s care facilities and even at a center for emotionally-challenged children. But truth be told, I haven’t met with much success with our local hospitals, despite the fact that healing gardens have caught on with countless such facilities coast to coast. I don’t know quite why this is, but we
Last month, I opened a two-part discussion on healing gardens, a trend in landscape design that’s become popular among managers at hospitals and other healthcare facilities who desire spaces where patients, visitors and staff can spend a bit of time in nature to heal, set aside stress and otherwise regenerate themselves. In the time since I first became involved with these spaces, I’ve also seen demand for these gardens – known in other contexts as “tranquility gardens” – grow among
Built to function and compete in an era when marketing matters for healthcare facilities, the McKay-Dee Hospital Center was designed to create a soothing, supportive, healing environment for patients, visitors and staff - so much so that the center looks more like a resort hotel than a medical institution. The architecture is open and soaring, offering sweeping views from interior spaces set up for comfort and restfulness. Designed by Jeff Stouffler of HKS Architects of Dallas, the structure is organized around a four-story atrium that runs the length of the building, offering clear lines of sight not only to distant mountain and valley views, but also to nearby landscapes graced with winding paths and beautiful watershapes. The opening of the 690,000-square-foot facility on March 25, 2002, was accompanied by great public fanfare. As people in the community have embraced and begun to seek care there, it's been a point of pride for us at Bratt Water Features to know that the beautiful curving lake that wraps around the exterior of the gleaming building is one of the things people see, enjoy and appreciate the most. BROAD SCOPE Our job was to build all of watershapes, including seven small fountains and the big lake system, based on designs prepared by Waterscape Consultants of Houston and by landscape architect James Burnett, also of Houston. As bidders on the installation contract in 1999, we had the advantage of being a local firm - but we also brought extensive experience with large-scale public waterfeatures to the table. And this project was big. As far as anyone on the design team knows, this is the largest waterfeature/fountain complex ever built in the state of Utah. We refer affectionately to the feature as "Bullwinkle" because, when seen from overhead, its oddly symmetrical free-form shape casts a silhouette resembling the cartoon moose's head and antlers. The antlers wrap around the footprint of the west end of the building, with the nose stretching away from hospital to create a broad lake with a towering geyser at the far end. The 175-foot-wide, 500-foot-long watershape features a 170-foot-long waterfall between the antlers and the crown of Bullwinkle's head that faces an outdoor pavilion/eating area served by an indoor café. The water falls four feet into a teardrop-shaped lower pond that serves as a catch basin - and which turned out to be critical to
Last month, we covered a side-yard project that fulfilled one family's dream of gaining a kitchen garden. This functional design worked well for what had basically been a small, unused space - but it's by no means the only use for such spaces. Small spaces can lend themselves to a number of different possibilities. Discussing the clients' lifestyle or wish list might uncover something they really want or can identify ideas they haven't yet considered as possible uses for the space. Case in point: I had a client who wanted to create three
Take the world's most prolific consumer technology company on one hand and, on the other, its desire to augment its corporate headquarters with a natural exterior environment intended to capture geological processes that span millions of years: It's a collision of present and past, of technology and nature, that is filled with meaning as well as exciting potential. Those sorts of thoughts and paradoxes were somewhere on everyone's minds as we approached the design and installation of a grand-scale watershape at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., corporate campus. Our aim: to create a spectacular and entirely
