vanishing edge
It’s not often that a watershaper tackles a job that takes more than two years of complete, full-time effort, but that’s been the case for the project pictured here. For nearly two and a half years, in fact, I devoted virtually all of my working life to this single backyard watershape environment, and as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there were times when I wondered if I was crazy to get involved with a project of this scope. Indeed, to describe it simply as a “backyard watershape environment” is to fall miles short of conveying the complexity of the systems covered in two previous WaterShapes articles (“When Dreams Grow,” April 2008, click here; and “Layering the Experience,” July 2008, click here): It was a monster project, and there were times I thought the beast had me at a distinct disadvantage. You know all about that, of course, if you’ve followed this sequence of articles, so I won’t belabor the point. Here, we’ll wrap things up by letting the photographs tell most of the story – although I must say the images don’t quite
‘I want the house to look as though it is floating on water.” That was what architect Victor Canas told me when I was called out to visit this site on the northwestern coast of Costa Rica. It was a brilliant idea, certainly one that befitted the spectacular mountaintop setting and its breathtaking 360-degree views of rugged coastline, forest greenery and assorted perspectives to horizons in all directions. I had the advantage in this case of already having built a
Of all the design innovations that have spread through the general watershaping community in the past 20 years or so, I can’t think of any that has captured consumer imaginations as dramatically as have vanishing-edge designs. They rose from minimal presence in the late 1980s to become the most recognizable and popular of all
By Ron Gibbons The wetlands of Long Island provide a natural backdrop for this exquisitely…
We describe them using many terms – as vanishing-edge, infinity-edge, negative-edge, knife-edge, slot-overflow, flooded-deck, gutter or perimeter-overflow pools, among others – but no matter what we call them, all of these watershapes operate on the same basic premise: By moving a sufficient quantity of water from a collection basin or tank to a visible main vessel at a sufficient rate, we can create systems in which
