At the LA Music Center, designed by Welton Beckett, several hundred water columns rise directly from the paving, surrounding on fours sides a sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz, Peace on Earth. Choreographed to rise through a range of heights, the jets can be turned off to recover the plaza for large events.Los Angeles based WET, founded in 1983 by Mark Fuller, designs and engineers water features, develops innovative technology, and provides ongoing maintenance. Its inventions include more than fifty nozzles and valves, water illumination systems, control technologies, fire features, and compressed air-driven water jets that use only twenty percent of conventional technology.
Central to WET’s investigations is an aspiration to erase the boundaries between people and water in the built landscape. These half dozen projects illustrate several approaches to this goal, conceived both for pleasure and for safety.
WET’s redesign of the Seattle Center International Fountain, which had originally been a part of the 1962 World’s Fair, placed a giant, stainless steel dome in the center of the bowl-shaped plaza. A ring of pulsing water jets surrounds the dome, from which spout a series of arcing jets, in which children (of all ages) are free to play. Periodically, a 150-foot high column of water, driven by compressed air, erupts from the top of the dome.
Universal City’s City Walk, designed with The Jerde Partnership, features pulsing water spouts, swirls of mist, and a unifying, highly reflective water membrane.
At first glance, WET’s fountain at Columbus Circle in New York appears more conventional than these other examples. Yet, in fact, it reverses the typical relationship, placing the pools of water around the public space, rather than occupying the center of the space. And the edging of the pools is designed to invite seating—with one’s feet in the water.
Millenia Walk in Singapore also employs reflective water membranes across black granite. Because the granite surfaces are set flush with the adjacent walkways—the water membrane has essentially no depth—no barriers are required between the two.
For SOM’s Gas Company Tower in Los Angeles, WET extended the geometry of the elevator lobby, textile-like, with fingers of water that begin in the lobby and extend through the glazed wall to the exterior. Inside, the fingers of water are covered by glass plates, marked by a pattern of small, vertical jets of water. Outside, the glass plates are eliminated, and the jets rise subtly above flanking reflective water membranes over granite paving.Originally published 3rd quarter 2008, in arcCA 08.3, “Engineering + Architecture.”
