water effects
As animated fountain systems become more and more common in public settings, Toronto’s Crystal Fountains continues to push the creative and technical evelopes. Here Simon Gardiner profiles a recent project that utilizes the company’s latest design software and newly developed jets to create an engaging experience for people of all ages.
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This story starts with a tree falling in the forest. It wasn't just any tree: It was a huge locust that had stood next to what is now my driveway for years beyond reckoning, and when it came down it did its best to take a tangle of utility lines with it. I wasn't there when all of this happened, but I returned soon thereafter and saw the lingering effects: The utility companies had done a wonderful job of cutting away portions of the tree that had fallen onto the wires and had effectively cleared the road, but
Bobé Water & Fire Features (Phoenix, AZ) offers Pure Flow, a scupper engineered for a…
When I prepare my Travelogues, I always spend some time, usually midway through the process, looking at what's available on the Internet to support the basic observations I'm getting ready to offer. Often, for example, I'll confirm information I already have about designers or engineers or installers (and their clients), touching all the bases to get the details right. As important, I'm on the lookout for
When New York's Long Island comes up in conversation, most people think about the Hamptons, exclusive summer resorts, incredible estates and beaches by the mile. But that image has a flip side: For many years, in fact, Wyandanch, a hamlet within the town of Babylon, N.Y., has been a community that has had very little go its way, with poverty-stricken streets, gang activity and not much going on that would make its citizens hopeful about
I confess to having a weakness for this sort of fountain: There’s probably something about the mixture of water and “animated” sculpture that grabs my imagination in a way that isn’t true of many large-scale water displays.
It this case, it may also have something to do with serendipity and the fact that, the first time I saw this composition, I came upon it entirely by chance. It was about ten years ago, while I was in Irving, Texas, for a series of meetings and had part of a day to myself to walk around and take in the nearby sights.
It was early in the morning when a view of Williams Square opened up and I saw the Mustangs of Las Colinas, a string of larger-than-life bronzes by Robert Glen that seem to run through a narrow watercourse. (That “stream” and the surrounding plaza were devised by SWA Group, a landscape architecture firm with offices in California, Texas and overseas.)
The composition was eight years in the making by the time it was unveiled in 1984, and I remember well the high (and much-deserved) level of attention and praise it gathered in the architectural press at the time.
This is exactly the sort of chance encounter that made me happiest about being a steady traveler for so many years. If you find yourself in the Dallas area and have any opportunity to see this work of watershaping art in person, I strongly recommend the effort!
To see a brief video of the Mustangs at Las Colinas, click here.
I’ve been discussing watershapes with clients for about 25 years now, and it’s been a long time since I was surprised by any of the questions they’ve asked me along the way. I’ve noticed, of course, that in many cases I’ve been asked
Toronto-based Crystal Fountains has designed a dramatic, multifunctional waterfeature for White Square Office Center, a major new commercial development in Moscow. The company describes
Certainly one of the world’s most unusual watershaping achievements, ‘Le Reve’ is a Las Vegas-style aquatic production that carries audiences into an amazing dream world of water, light, music and incredible acrobatic skill. To achieve the water effects, former Cirque du Soleil producer Franco Dragone turned to Aviram Müller and Canada’s Kaarajal Design Aquatique – and the result is a marriage of watershaping art and technology unlike any other. Franco Dragone’s design team first contacted me late in 2003. His company, which organizes groups of design firms to create some of the world’s most elaborate stage productions, was working on a new Las Vegas extravaganza for hotelier Steve Wynn. Wynn’s properties are famous for their water effects, including the wonderful fountains in front of Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip. I was told that his then-current project, the Wynn Resort, was to feature similarly spectacular water elements – one of which was to be
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
