Word: fountaining
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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...
...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...
Romans still point out the narrow street not far from the Trevi Fountain where, in March 1944, a partisan bomb attack wiped out a 33-man Waffen-SS unit. Kappler, then an SS colonel acting as police chief of the German occupation force in Rome, received orders from Berlin to execute ten times as many hostages in reprisal. Within 36 hours, German troops had rounded up several truckloads of Italian civilians. The Italians were taken to the ancient Ardeatine Caves three miles south of Rome and there were shot dead. The precise toll was 335-five more than Kappler...