systems

Healing Waters
In our business, when we talk about people with disabilities, we always put people first:  We speak of "people with brain injuries," for instance, or "people with arthritis" or "people with spinal injuries."  That's an important distinction, because the language informs the entire mindset needed to help them improve their situations in the most effective ways.   For starters, this "people-first" approach helps us avoid misleading generalizations:  Often, we find that two people with nominally similar conditions or disabilities will have significantly different needs and that the methods used to treat each may prove to be significantly different as well.  Everything we do at the Brown Center, in other words, must be based on the individual's own
Healing Waters
In our business, when we talk about people with disabilities, we always put people first:  We speak of "people with brain injuries," for instance, or "people with arthritis" or "people with spinal injuries."  That's an important distinction, because the language informs the entire mindset needed to help them improve their situations in the most effective ways.   For starters, this "people-first" approach helps us avoid misleading generalizations:  Often, we find that two people with nominally similar conditions or disabilities will have significantly different needs and that the methods used to treat each may prove to be significantly different as well.  Everything we do at the Brown Center, in other words, must be based on the individual's own
Sealing the Deal
The latest generation of Las Vegas hotels and casinos offers an amazing showcase for pools, fountains and watershapes of every shape and size.  In fact, for many such properties, the presence of these increasingly imaginative watershapes is crucial to defining their appeal for huge numbers of guests and visitors. As these properties and their watershapes have become more elaborate and unconventional, they've presented designers, engineers and builders with greater and greater technical challenges - many of them carried in the plain fact that water can inflict a great deal of damage on these facilities if it is not properly contained and controlled.   In our end of the watershaping trades, the visual and sensory arms race has challenged the waterproofing industry to step up to the plate and manage the integrity of every nook and cranny of every vessel, be it wide or narrow, curved or straight, below-grade or
The Birth of a Dream
It's speculated that the exterior spaces at Playboy Mansion West must be the most photographed in the world.   That's hard to quantify, of course, but it's certainly safe to say that since construction began in the 1970s, the home of publisher Hugh Hefner and its famous swimming pool and grotto have been used ceaselessly to promote his unique lifestyle.  Indeed, the residence has attained near-mythic status as the world's most elaborate adult playground. For about 20 years, we had
Testing Know-How
Even watershapers who don't perform daily tests of water quality in the systems they design and/or build will benefit from being familiar with the various methods available for water analysis, says Michael Gardner of Taylor Technologies.  Such knowledge, he notes, helps in starting up new systems, formulating chemical-treatment regimens, calibrating automatic controllers or simply educating those who'll care for the watershapes you create.
Deconstructing a Trap
For the most part, we keep things positive in the pages of WaterShapes, and for good reason:  With so much inspiring and amazing work taking place every day in all corners of the watershaping trades, negative subjects seldom