WaterShapes

Planning on Concealment
Once you start thinking along the lines of putting visual clutter out of sight, it’s as though a whole range of interesting concealment possibilities begin presenting themselves. Case in point: My early work in stashing hoses in buried utility boxes triggered thoughts about hiding other bits of deck “plumbing” that do a remarkable job of
Unconventional Plaster?
When I started my career more than 20 years ago, habit and standards dictated that swimming pool plaster should be white. By that time, happily, a handful of suppliers had begun offering colored aggregates, and then products including PebbleTec began expanding the palette to a point where about a dozen colors were available, give or take a few. These were shades of blue, mostly, ranging through to grays and darker grays. Then, about ten years ago,
Test Your Knowledge #29
Swimmer Ian Thorpe Fails toQualify for London Olympics
Historic Reflections
I’ve spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., through the years. I was born there in the 1950s, my favorite aunt lived there in the ’60s, one of my brothers lived there through part of the ’70s, business took me to the area frequently in the ’80s and ’90s, and one of my sisters
Ripples #40
Compiled and Written by Lenny Giteck Kenny Chesney Fan Breaks into Singer’s Home, Sips Drink by Pool
2012/3.2, March 21 — Mark Holden on ART, Working with Stone, Water on Capitol Mall and more
March 21, 2012 WATERSHAPES.COM INTERVIEW It’s All About ART Seizing an opportunity to raise the…
Coming Attractions
Through the past several weeks, I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of conversations about ART – Artistic Resources & Training. It’s the new educational forum being built by Mark Holden and a collection of like-minded professionals (including David Tisherman, Kevin Fleming, Judith Corona and Larry Drasin, among many others) who want to kick the level of instruction and information now available to watershapers and environmental artists up to
Want to Avoid Getting ‘Hosed’?
There are all sorts of amenities associated with outdoor living that, taken together, conspire to create what I see as undesirable visual clutter. This is why, when I approach any backyard project, I take my time in sizing up my clients and doing all I can to figure out how they’ll be using the space. If it’s to be an active, family-oriented play/recreational space, for example, I’ll start thinking about
Working with Stone the Right Way
Before I get to the meat of this series on using stone in landscapes and as part of aquatic environments, I must address an important concept having to do with how people have built with stone, both historically and in the here and now. The vast majority of stone walls and fences you see today – whether they were built 700 years ago or 70 – were
It’s All About ART
Interview by Jim McCloskeyMark Holden smiles a lot these days, happy with the progress he, David Tisherman and a group of fellow instructors have made in the very short time they’ve been organizing a new educational program. That program, called Artistic Resources & Training – or ART for short – is a spinoff of his years of trying to make the study of watershapes part of the curriculum taught to students of landscape architecture in American universities. Holden is a perpetual-motion machine these days, pulling together