vision
With a first glance at last month's cover of LandShapes, a colleague of mine said he thought it more properly belonged on the cover of an architecture magazine instead of on my landscape publication. It was beautiful, he said, but he felt that the dominance of the wall in the image made him wonder if he'd received the right magazine. In defending the choice of this photograph, I found myself flooded by all sorts of thoughts and considerations, many of them having to do with
Water is one of the few artistic media that has the ability to define the architecture of human emotion. In all its various forms, it has affected us in profound ways since the dawn of our species, generating powerful feelings and the sense that we are somehow transformed when we're in its presence. As watershapers, we have an ability to use that long anthropological and cultural heritage to our advantage and can actually change the world: The spaces we create will, if done well, generate experiences so powerful that all who enter these environments will forever be changed by the encounter. I see this as both a wonderful opportunity and a solemn obligation. We can take the rich history of water and all its cultural reverberations and essentially use this symphony of tradition and creative impetuosity to compose new experiences for everyone who sees our work. If it's our intention to change the world for the better - something I personally have always held in mind - we do our best when we base our work on traditions assembled throughout human history. Working in that context, we not only gain access to the insights of the geniuses who have gone before us but also
I'm particularly interested in the behavior of water. To me as a sculptor, differing water flows and their textures are like "colors" to a painter: I find a color that holds meaning for me and then look for a structural form that can present it. To this extent, my artistic medium is the behavior of water and the means to make it behave. The sculpture in this case is water combined with a structure in steel, stone and equipment. The work is abstract: abstractions of feelings related to the movement of people, animals, fish and the flows of water in streams, rivers, rain - even the flow of numbers. As a result, I need metaphors and feelings to drive my creative expressions, then use water and other sculptural elements in much the same way a choreographer might use line and gesture to express a feeling or a composer will use chord changes and musical phrasing. My hope is that, in creating forms that are meaningful to me, other
The key to progress in most industries is the presence of people who are able to see through to a better tomorrow. At WaterShapes, we've sought to create a forum for
I remember several years ago, back before it was really fashionable to build completely naturalistic pools, that I decided this was exactly what I wanted to do. This was in the very early 80s, when you'd see maybe some rocks on the bond beam or a waterfall on the end of the pool - but that was about as natural as it got back then. My new idea was to create environments that were completely natural, stem to stern. I tried presenting the concept to a number of potential clients, explaining how we could do things like angle the top of the pool and install rocks all around the edge and create natural
A Time for Leadership