sound
This past April, my wife Gina and I spent two wonderful weeks in Hawaii. As is true of most of those who visit our 50th state, we were mainly there to relax and enjoy warm weather, tropical Pacific waters, breathtaking scenery, fine cuisine and laid-back Hawaiian culture. As has been the case for countless others who’ve been there, we were not disappointed: Hawaii is everything people have said it is and much, much more. As a watershape designer, I had the added pleasure of being able to study a huge number of waterfalls and streams that mark many of the islands’ most appealing landscapes, particularly on Maui and Kauai. It was one of those happy situations where
My first experience with these clients had to do with their backyard pool: They let me know they weren't quite satisfied with what they had and wanted me to come in and set things straight. The result of this collaboration was a tropical, Hawaiian-style paradise they truly love. The next time they called, it was about their large front yard. I initially assumed, of course, that they would want me to carry themes established in the backyard out to the street, but I was mistaken: What they desired instead was a Japanese garden-style woodland complete with a pond/waterfall system, a teahouse and more. Admittedly, it's somewhat unusual for a property to have so pronounced a split personality, but in this case, it was not only what the clients desired, but it also made perfect sense because
My dictionary defines a rill as a small stream cut by erosion. In the practice of watershaping, however, that colorful little word has been stretched to cover manufactured channels in which we artfully move water from one place to another. These often-subtle effects have a history dating at least to the 5th Century BC, when Persian kings demonstrated their power over nature by using rills to bring water – a symbol of fertility as well as a practical means of cooling architectural spaces – from rivers and aqueducts to their palaces. These early rills were observed and adopted by Muslim designers and engineers who rose to eminence in the Middle East more than a millennium later and were carried along as Islamic influence spread through India, North Africa and, eventually, Spain, where signature elements of Moorish architecture are still seen today in the famous
Not to diminish the painted ponies of The Wizard of Oz, but Steve Mann’s hydraulophones are horses of a different color. These watershapes come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from landmark centerpieces that have the sculptural grandeur of pipe organs all the way down to water-flutes that resemble brightly colored tadpoles. What’s most remarkable about these devices isn’t just their structural and artistic variety or the ways they look as visual art: It’s the sounds they make. At first, the natural comparison is to a pipe organ, but as you listen, a variety of shadings and other sonic reverberations emerge, slip and slide around you. What’s more, hydraulophones invite people to insert their fingers into the jetting water to shape the sound and squeeze out the shape of each note, and a variety of sonic textures are possible depending upon
For me, hitting the high notes in watershaping and landscape design is a product of careful observation, boundless imagination and detailed visualization. These factors drive the design process, after which I transition into the more practical phases of the project with reliable engineering and quality construction. The early, creative phases can definitely be tricky, because they require many of my clients to take great leaps of faith, especially when what they're after is a highly customized environment - something truly unique. In those cases, we know that we at Artisan Home Resorts (San Jose, Calif.) are asking clients to visualize something nobody's ever seen before: No matter how well we represent our ideas on paper or on a computer screen, the outcome will, to a certain degree, remain an abstraction until the everything is finished and working. When everything finally comes together (as we believe it did in the project illustrated in this feature), a vision is realized and the payoff can be extremely rewarding, both for the clients and for those of us who worked hard to see the process through. Here as in few other projects we've done, however, even we weren't precisely sure how
For me, hitting the high notes in watershaping and landscape design is a product of careful observation, boundless imagination and detailed visualization. These factors drive the design process, after which I transition into the more practical phases of the project with reliable engineering and quality construction. The early, creative phases can definitely be tricky, because they require many of my clients to take great leaps of faith, especially when what they're after is a highly customized environment - something truly unique. In those cases, we know that we at Artisan Home Resorts (San Jose, Calif.) are asking clients to visualize something nobody's ever seen before: No matter how well we represent our ideas on paper or on a computer screen, the outcome will, to a certain degree, remain an abstraction until the everything is finished and working. When everything finally comes together (as we believe it did in the project illustrated in this feature), a vision is realized and the payoff can be extremely rewarding, both for the clients and for those of us who worked hard to see the process through. Here as in few other projects we've done, however, even we weren't precisely sure how
Who took the water out of watershapes? That may seem a ridiculous question, but it's also an obvious one when you see as many plans as I do - and by that I mean plans intended to indicate and initiate the watershaping parts of a wide variety of projects. Indeed, in my long experience in running an engineering-oriented firm, I've repeatedly been asked by designers to flesh out their watershape "ideas" (although in most cases vague inklings would probably be a more accurate way to describe them) and provide working drawings that reflect their "thinking." In my estimation, more than three-quarters of these plans lack any real indication of what the designers expect the water to do or how they want it to look. Instead, what I get is the typical overhead views with the ubiquitous "blue ghosts" or, in some cases, rudimentary sections of structures designed to contain water. It's left to me to probe and ask questions and determine what expectations they have about how the water is to appear and what it is to do. I've endured these common plan shortcomings for more years than I care to count, always wondering
Who took the water out of watershapes? That may seem a ridiculous question, but it's also an obvious one when you see as many plans as I do - and by that I mean plans intended to indicate and initiate the watershaping parts of a wide variety of projects. Indeed, in my long experience in running an engineering-oriented firm, I've repeatedly been asked by designers to flesh out their watershape "ideas" (although in most cases vague inklings would probably be a more accurate way to describe them) and provide working drawings that reflect their "thinking." In my estimation, more than three-quarters of these plans lack any real indication of what the designers expect the water to do or how they want it to look. Instead, what I get is the typical overhead views with the ubiquitous "blue ghosts" or, in some cases, rudimentary sections of structures designed to contain water. It's left to me to probe and ask questions and determine what expectations they have about how the water is to appear and what it is to do. I've endured these common plan shortcomings for more years than I care to count, always wondering
Sometimes it's the most ordinary experiences that yield the most sublime memories - the pleasant surprise, a beautiful view, the warmth of the sun after a dip in the ocean. For me (and I suspect I'm not alone), these experiences occur
For many of us in the watershaping business, the design and creation of fountains and water displays follows a predictable set of functional patterns. Given the traditional tools of the trade and our repertoire of nozzles and spray apparatus, for example, we tend to fashion effects and shapes from the ground up, literally throwing water in the air in a more or less uncontrolled manner. From a design standpoint, the problem with this tradition is that it eats up space like nobody's business: The pools needed to catch free-falling flows of any noteworthy height need to be large enough to capture water subject to the effects of splash, wind drift and overspray. The higher the spray, the larger must be the footprint of the pool to contain it adequately. As a rule, these pools need to have diameters of twice the height of the spray - by any measure a significant contribution of expensive commercial real estate to the creative effort at a time when property owners are motivated to make every available square foot an income producer. As an alternative in this space race, watershapers have found dry-deck or curbless fountains to be a great way to
