Shaping Water into Art

By A.T. Baker

A fantasia of fountains adorns Downtown, U.S.A.

Water. Shapeless in itself, it can take MI multitudinous shapes. Colorless in itself, it can produce iridescences beyond any artist's palette. Soundless and inert in itself, it can in action induce a sense of rushing speed and frenetic energy; in tranquillity, a sense of meditative peace. In the most bleak of concrete jungles, water is a hope and a memory, a green thought in an ungreen shade.

Ever since Moses struck the rock and brought forth water, it has been both a miracle and a counted blessing, one humanity has done nothing to deserve but cannot live without. And like all such blessings, people have been fiddling with it ever since, among other things to suit their convenience and enhance delight. At least as far back as Babylon, architects and engineers have tried to shape water into an art form.

Fountains are one example. Though they have been livening up city squares in Europe for centuries, America's city builders for a long time gave scant thought to the frivolous pleasure that fountains offer. But in the past few years, urban planners all around the country have been turning more and more imaginatively to water with some refreshing and spectacular results.

Basically, the new fountain makers use water to set off sculptural shapes that evoke nature but are in themselves totally abstract. Even in areas of water scarcity, fountains, thanks to efficient recycling systems, do not waste much water, and modern architects are free to enhance austere downtown buildings with sweet sound and motion or, using water in pools, give majesty to otherwise humdrum plazas.

Perhaps the leading designer in the fountain renaissance is Lawrence Halprin, 61, a freewheeling iconoclast who has opinions on the shape of cities, freeways (he thinks they should be sculptures in the cityscape) and water. In the city, he says, "water affects us in the same way as does a wild animal in a zoo, pacing back and forth in his cage, beautiful and quietly desperate, controlled but with implications of wild danger." Halprin's latest work is a cascade for Seattle's Freeway Park. Like Alph, Kubla Khan's sacred river, the Seattle cascade plunges through a chasm, this one measurable to man, down to a sunless picture window through which park visitors can watch traffic on the adjacent freeway underpass swim silently by like fish in a tank. That was one intent of the design--to drown out the downtown freeway's noise. "It's like action painting," Halprin explains. "My works are not fulfilled until they are in use."

Next to Halprin, Architect Philip Johnson, 71, is probably the man most interested in water as art. "Modern architecture is so dull and flat in itself that architects began looking for something to enliven it--and they remembered Rome." So says the man who added fountains to the foreplaza of New York City's Seagram Building, which he co-designed with Mies van der Rohe. Johnson's most conspicuous recent water work is Fort Worth's Water Garden. The garden has three pools, each with a different speed-sound characteristic--"quiet, fizz and rush." The "quiet" pool is surrounded by a high wall with a continuous gutter that spills softly along its top, keeping the walls continuously dark and wet, adding to a public sensation of cool quiet and private peace. The "fizz" pool shoots up some 25 spray jets, producing a continual mist --"like ground fog settling among trees or over a swamp." The "rush" is a deep vortex of cascading water, studded with descending steps on which children and adults can climb, play or simply perch in the rejuvenating flow.

Fountain makers have found that unlike many Europeans who do not seem to mind getting slightly wet in the vicinity of fountains, American passers-by are not amused by an errant drenching from a wind-blown water jet. Some are even inclined to call the police. Many new fountains, therefore, are designed to be windproof.

Viewer protection, for example, explains the shape of San Francisco's Embarcadero Fountain, designed by Canadian Sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. Its writhing concrete contours have been described as "Stonehenge unhinged with plumbing troubles," but the fountain splashes no passerby. It is, however, laced with "lily pad" walks that offer a spray-drenched way, daring visitors to walk beneath its eccentric geometry.

The new Mall in Albany, N.Y., demonstrates just how well ancient traditions can still serve architecture if the will (and the cash) is forthcoming. Architect Wallace K. Harrison, looking for a way to animate the plaza in designing the huge $1 billion-plus complex, went back to the idea of reflecting pools. And what reflecting pools they are! The largest is six hundred feet long and it sits in a park atop garages and a shopping mall. In winter part of it is frozen for skaters. Says Harrison: "It changes the feeling of the whole city of Albany."

So has the fountain that tumbles from a corner of Boston's Siena-like City Hall Plaza, where secretaries and bureaucrats now take their brown-bag lunches. Perhaps, like Robert Frost's pilgrim in Directive ("Back out of all this now too much for us"), the city folk find in their new fountains something of that hidden spring, where they can "drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

-- A.T. Baker

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