My best friend Steve settles in, hard by the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon, during their wonderful visit there a couple years back. The Keller Fountain offers a full body experience which can be especially refreshing on hot Summer days. Fountains such as this were designed to enjoy up close and personal, a wonderful civic experience amid the workaday world and the hubub therein.
Public edifices are like smiles – no one forces you use them. They are a response to an urge to appreciate ourselves and therefore make absolutely no real rational or intellectual sense. Like anything which is beautiful, the wonder is implicit as we adore what we see. I believe beauty lights us up inside by its contagious nature. I think that’s why God invented beautiful men and women. I mean, you can have too much mud, let’s face it.
Below, we catch a stunning work of man in this constructed waterfall and a couple of huge lakes on the Papa John’s Pizza campus in Louisville. It’s a wonderful place to walk, with a landscape just completely enriching to experience. The scale is pretty much off the charts – an installer’s Paradise, with tiny little projects abounding.
Catching the corporate Paradise urge, enlivening our outdoors with splendid works of architectural and constructed resemblances of Nature Herself, we go to Seattle and visit the amazing waterfall built by my friends at Teufel Nurseries for the Microsoft Campus. This one needs to be seen to fully appreciate.
I’m a huge urban fountain fan. I love seeing a bustling population all buzzing around these “human flypaper” structures. Humans are plain drawn to water – it’s a trait we probably manifested back when we were fish – (I’ll ask a couple of my older friends to verify) – our children seem to believe water is magical, even when contaminated with mud. It’s just that cool!
So what we get with these designs are not just the wonder of water itself, acting on us in all of water’s ineffably strange and subtle manners, but we also get to grade the structures made to support it all. This one below generally gets an “A”.
I guess it deserves it.
This one below – The Magic Fountain – is in Barcelona – just another of the many reasons I need to see that town. The lighting alone on this stunning public fountain is absolutely Galactic Class:
Breath-taking, really, isn’t it?
Fun-loving civic projects – both publicly and privately-funded provide more grist for the Beauty Mill. For the vast majority of us, a puddle can be a world in and of itself. When placed in the hands of ambitious designers, they take on another entire realm of Wonder, such as this Singapore Fountain, the largest in the World:
It just doesn’t stop. Fun, vibrantly colorful, aided by lighting and engineering trickery, we look at such things and laugh. Their reason to exist is so tentative, yet so enabling for us all to catch our Souls as they smile.
Actually, some do better than water. Check out this fountain and guess what material the Bellagio Casino is featuring………..
Yes, that would be four different varieties of……..Chocolate.
What a Hijack! I admit I tried breaking in but was caught, handcuffed and led to the Pay Section where they only had 450 different chocolate items. They mentioned the scores of Choco-holics who gathered around this fountain and that my behavior was not the slightest bit unusual. They have a Drool Patrol who are often called in for clean-up purposes.
So where were we? Oh – sure! Lawns. No? Oh, fountains again? OK, just to say we did, here’s an unusual one, found right smack in the middle of Chicago:
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa designed the Crown Fountain to be a tribute to the people of Chicago. The faces that appear to spit streams of water out from the towers are those of 1,000 Chicagoans rotated at random. Though water only flows from mid-spring to mid-fall each year in consideration of Chicago’s often nasty winter weather, the LCD screens are on full time. This one and the next one – Andres Heller-designed – have been shown in here before, but their fascinating uniqueness deserve a reprise. In my opinion, there are some things which never get old. This is from the entrance to the Swarovski headquarters in Wattens, Austria.
William Pye – a killer website here – is another searcher taken from among the multitude of artists featuring water in fountains as well as in actual works of art – or both. His work typically is most prminently identified from his incredible Vortex Water Sculpture called Charybdis – here it is:
Other works of Mr. Pye are clearly constructed by someone who is utterly fascinated with water and its effects, such as this gorgeous work below and a more distant perspective of the same work taken from farther out. This work is called “Canyon” and it fits:
Please enlarge these to get their fuller effect -
Other William Pye works include this gorgeous metal piece outside of Lloyd’s Shipping in London, a work entitled “Argosy”:
Pye’s ultimate fascination did indeed result in ways and means to watch the kenetic properties of rushing water as it appears as a flowing entity over different surfaces and at different pulsations. He was also hugely interested in how light performed in and through water, a gift he dealt out very lushly.
Below is a 6 story drop of a cascade which is attached to a wall. It’s pretty long but totally worth the look in here:
The cascade consists of a vertical rill of water flowing down six storeys of bronze panels that are sculpted to create a ripple effect in the water. Four glass panels forming the water wall are suspended from a cantilevered tubular structure, which both holds them in place and acts as a conduit for the water supply. Water is distributed evenly along the length of the panels and flows over the back and front surfaces of the glass. The water is caught in the shallow granite pool into which fibre-optic lights are set. These pick out the colours in the bronze backdrop and highlight the shapes created by the rippling water.
Pretty cool! ;-)
Back to chocolate………………..
This “Chocolate Fountain” you can actually dip from. It is from a place with the Other-Worldly title of the “Cologne Chocolate Museum” which, in itself, is enough to drive certain persons I know to light-headedness. I have therefore supplied a link here – Chocolate Museum – so that they can verify its existence and plan accordingly.
My advice is to wait a week.
A small bit of distraction, first……….. I always hate omitting Tivoli, simply because I think rather ancient stuff rocks:
But then, I was in Korea for a while in another life and what they did to this bridge I can’t help but be proud of and to absolutely adore:
Here is a very cool video of this – Banpo – bridge in operation:
In a parallel Universe, I write a blog for a local Louisville company: Pond And Fountain World. (link included). In so doing, it has allowed me to study and roam around, looking at an absolutely fascinating subject. Not only does the blog feature what they sell – currently-retailed pond and fountain accouterments, including an excellent selection of pre-made fountains, ready to deliver and install – but it also gives me the right and reason to explore the entirety of the world of fountains, internationally.
Wow! What a treat. Below from The University of Connecticut’s Waterbury Campus:
The designs of those who build these things come from a creativity one can only guess at in its artistic purity, apparent freedom and in their sometimes overall immensity. “Mind-boggling” comes to mind as we tour the most outlandish and absolutely breath-taking water-art sculptures, sitting as so many do in the public squares of our major cities. From the work of Lawrence Halprin in Portland, Oregon -
My great good friend, Steve, gets to sit at the bottom of Halprin’s Ira Keller Fountain in the face of the seeming vastness of the fountain while it crashes down, so nearby:
These gorgeous civic fountains are now becoming less formal and more amenable to “audience participation these days – a welcome respite from an overly-litigious society in general, which I welcome wholeheartedly:
Here is Halprin’s stunning blend of “The Natural” and “The Modern” work at the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, shown here at night -
Some History
Fountains were initially creations which were fed from aqueducts – the original plumbing apparatus, dating back at least 2,500 years. Often, these aqueducts would send water downwards, creating the pressure which allowed the newly-minted fountains in Greece, for initial historical example, to spurt water out for public and private consumption. Fountains and public water sources, fed by the rivers, lakes and streams in the mountains, began appearing around 260 BC in Ancient Greece. The notion of “siphoning” became pioneered and created works which could allow water to run or not run, depending on opening and closing a valve.
In the end, aqueducts would literally terminate in city centers or plaza’s where the resulting pressure and large quantities of water supplied could be more fully appreciated by attaching art work and form to the terminus.
The Trevi Fountain, in fact, Rome’s famous “Fountain Of Love” featured by Hollywood so many times, was just this sort of product.
(Picture credit here to Tour Of Rome, along with the quote below, capsulizing better than I could, a brief history of its construction.)
“There had been a source of water at this site for over a thousand years, although it was not until 1485 that Pope Nicholas V commissioned Gianlorenzo Bernini to create the fountain, but the project had to be abandoned when Pope Urban VIII died in 1644. Then in 1732, Niccolò Salvi was employed by Pope Clement XII to continue with the work, with the result being the Baroque masterpiece that completely dominates the little square today.”
For me, it is the mixture of “chthonic” elements – fit for the Gods alone – which assemble in the primordial primitive juxtaposition of the jagged rocks which also seem to be emitted by and to be so “at one” with the building behind. Like our own consciousness, we see a remarkable blend of the absolutely most Elemental mixed with the modern human and more mundane elements of muscle, posture and expressions. A fountain like this hits our perceptions in mental regions usually reserved for art. But then, who said fountains are not art?
Another personality who found the Lunatic Fringe of Modern Fountains is a Japanese designer named Isamu Noguchi. Below is his what is arguably his most famous work – his famous “Nine Floating Fountains”, constructed for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970.
Here it is in daylight, obviously on a windy day -
And below is the night-time look for which it has become so famous:
But Mr. Noguchi was not done. He obviously loved the impractical and the utterly whimsical – and he was a master at it:
He also had a definite sense of humor!
We owe debts of gratitude on an unimaginable scale to the artists who have taken our technologies and our appreciation for Water Art to absolutely absurd but-always-interesting lengths.
Some of them have driven cities and countries to drink! Take Mr. Vaillancourt’s concrete irritation to the city of San Fransisco’s more “proper” sensibilities as an example. “Please”, many said, “take it!”.
Some folks just need a sense of humor!
Can’t we all be friends?
Fountains are very nearly a “First Love” for me. It would not take much to get me all the way there, either.
Can I get some Love for the Paris Stravinsky Fountain???
Landscaping at the lunatic fringe of wealth, like carpeting at the lunatic fringe of wealth, or any other contracting trade, is its own class. Whereas it is a most heavenly possibility to help relieve these people from their overburdened wallets and bank accounts, the results can be disappointing, sad to say. Let’s just leave it at the point that not every encounter with the Uber-Wealthy is a positive experience. In fact, it’s about 50-50, the truth is.
I will absolutely not name names in my blog, other than referring to conversations of a casual or humorous nature. But I can tell of stories where people were strikingly miserable who were wealthy into the hundreds of millions and even billions. They’re people too! They need landscaping and all that stuff. Let’s just say – on a personal level – in many cases people get predictably suspicious of others when they have a lot. There is something to the adage that plenty yields some paranoia. Sometimes, a whole dam lot of it. In some cases, it becomes a threat to your own security. The rich play by their own sets of rules. In fact, many is the time that they make them up!
Anyway, rather than continue this line, knowing nothing we can say will change things that much, just know that merely working for impressive people with “beyond-impressive” homes is not some automatic entree to becoming rich one’s self. You can also go broke working for them – and almost just as easy. Sometimes – through no real fault of your own.
Here’s the third most expensive home in the US: (weighing in at a mere $100 million)
Here’s the pool! That’s marble, by the way.
Now, I admit, that was something of a freak show. In one case, it may well have been the most nervous time I ever spent landscaping. We literally had to transport ourselves in a huge excavator, complete with about an 8 ton boulder in our grasp, for placing in a water feature I regret to say I have no pictures of. The slightest rock or article in the way as we crept inside could have tipped the machine enough to scar the walls – or worse, of course – of the granite facing, there was that little tolerance. In fact, we graded and raked towards a perfect finish underneath, just so we could get that monster machine between the walls without incident. It was a white knuckle experience, right off the get go. In fact, as interesting as this project might seem to an outsider, it was a small version of Hell in many ways, there were so many eyes, including the owners – on us at all times. Nor did we last – lol, there were a total of 5 different companies who worked on the project, jettisoned one after another like players on a chessboard. Some projects are not worth the trouble, frankly. And that’s a tough lesson.
Now here’s a mere 17 million dollar home. Now we’re slumming!! Actually, this homeowner was in the dumps at various times for reasons which were his own, lol. I confess, I never really cared for the dude. He once referred to it as a “dump”. Go figure. Fortunately, we were contracted by the builder, rather than the owner, so we almost got paid completely! Oh – I almost forgot – it’s rare to get all your money with many of the more miserable of these types. What really makes that odd is the generation of higher prices to begin with for the proactive contractor, familiar with their ways. I once literally gave a rebate to a client in this category of wealth because he paid his bill in full. I’m not kidding, either. It may well have been the best few bucks I ever spent too. He sent more people my way than I had time to do.
So here’s what $450,000 worth of landscaping will get you: (bear in mind the more open areas were filled with perennial and annual plants and some very gorgeous lamps and lighting which were articles of beauty on their own at about $250 a piece, copper tulips, in fact, with blooms for lights, all multicolored. It is typical of this site that my pictures are made either during construction or soon – like real soon – after completion. We then move on.)
That waterfall there is a two part deal, branching out at the top and going in both directions. Here is the other side of it:
From the street, here is a longer range view:
Nor were these the only water features! We installed this one up by the front door.
It’s rather hard to make out owing to the fact that our drip irrigation sprayers were on at the time. Those Aspens, by the way, were our additions. 30′ feet high, it was a mighty tight fit putting them in so close to the house. They each weighed a couple of tons and were placed by a monstrous hydraulic tree spade, along with some Noble and White Firs we placed at other locations nearby.
Anyway, here is what the little water feature looked like in process. From this:
To this, then the finished product above. What was funny was that we decided to toss this in as a “toss-in”:
It had one humongous rear patio of stamped concrete:
The stone work was a triumph, however. These walls really add to the overall ambiance terrifically:
The driveway was an interesting mix of brick pavers and stamped concrete.
I really enjoyed the brick work on this project. It worked out outstandingly. Note the Firs in the picture above. Those we also planted, same with the Aspens. Here is a look at the large trees we inserted before we worked on the pavers. One is before we finished the project and the other is after. Of perhaps even more interest is a look at the wild numbers of electrical wiring, pipes and the general traffic in underground services, shown only slightly in the picture just below. Wiring for lights was inserted at the same time as the irrigation piping, irrigation wiring, electrical for the pumps running the water feature (220V) and even power for the heat tape and security gate which goes under the brick driveway:
Stressful at times, yet often resulting in sublime satisfaction for purely selfish reasons as an artisan and tradesman, projects such as these are what we literally die for.
I have a few of these cataloged and I await some pictures from my brother which include other outrageous projects, all of which mixed pleasure and pain in ample amounts – and in every conceivable way.
