water walls
While many construction details are forever hidden from view, notes Dave Peterson, others stand front and center. This waterwall treatment, for instance, is a prime example of a simple design idea that shapes the fluid characteristics of the feature while also keeping it from splashing into the surrounding area.
One thing I can safely say about the California city where I grew up is that it's a lot different from what it was like when I was a kid. Back in the 1960s, the area across from Santa Monica's City Hall was a mass of parking lots, office buildings and other hard, unattractive surfaces. The famed Civic Auditorium was at one end of the street, and a Moderne-style
{Multithumb} When second-generation metalworker and sculptor Kris Kesler wanted to take his custom waterfeatures to a higher, more artistic level, he took off his welding mask and picked up a computer mouse. It’s been liberating, he says, enabling him to design everything from simple scuppers to hurricane-proof fountains and take care of the details that make them work on screen before he puts his hands in gloves and goes at it with hammer and tongs. Growing up in a family of industrial and commercial fabricators, I was steeped from an early age in traditional metalworking techniques – hammering, planishing, leather-sandbag shaping and my favorite, torch welding. Learning at my father’s knee in his commercial steelwork factory led me to admire the artistry of craftspeople as they transformed raw hunks of metal into functional and often beautiful works of art. The power of that experience has always stuck with me. Later in life, when I decided to launch my own water- and fire-feature company, I was excited to get back behind the welding mask and
