Masters of the Dancing Waters : Universal City: The Disney veterans of WET Design enlist their imaginations in creating fountains for office buildings, theme parks and other sites.

Making water dance, blast, pop, spurt and wiggle is WET Design’s business.

WET Design, based in Universal City, creates high-tech fountains and other water projects for office buildings, civic centers, theme parks and stadiums. The privately held company is not huge: It has a staff of 38 and its annual revenue averages about $4 million. But it has carved a niche by finding ways to make water do the unthinkable.

For instance, dozens of water jets rise and fall from the Los Angeles Music Center’s plaza pavement, spraying tuxedoed concert-goers and tourists. The $1-million downtown fountain is one of WET’s most recognized local works.

WET’s fountains also adorn the Southern California Gas Co. building downtown, Plaza Camino Real in Carlsbad and the Koll Center in Irvine.

Mark Fuller and Alan Robinson, formerly of the special-effects division of WED Enterprises, started WET in 1983. WED Enterprises, now called Imagineering, is the Walt Disney Co. subsidiary that designs and engineers Disney theme parks.

Robinson supervised a team of designers for Disney’s Epcot Center in Florida, Disneyland’s new Fantasyland and Tokyo Disneyland, and created $30 million worth of effects equipment now part of the standard Disney collection. Fuller directed about 500 special effects for the parks, including glowing phosphorous pools and splashing waves at Disneyland’s Big Thunder Mountain.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Disney hired more than 2,000 designers and engineers from universities, planetariums and other firms to work on theme-park projects. But by the early 1980s, Epcot Center was finished, no new projects were imminent and Disney had laid off all but 12 of the 146 employees in the special-effects division.

Fuller and Robinson were spared, but when a developer asked them to create water effects for a Dallas bank building planned by famed architect I. M. Pei, they started moonlighting.

They left Disney to start WET a few months later. (A third WET co-founder, Melanie Simon, returned to Disney in 1985.) The Dallas project became Fountain Place, a $10-million, three-acre garden of pools and waterfalls surrounding the gleaming bank tower, which opened in 1987.

WET is one of several entertainment design companies that have been formed during the past decade by Disney alumni. Others include Iwerks Entertainment in Burbank, Technifex Inc. in Sun Valley and BRC Imagination Arts in Burbank.

Robinson, who oversees WET’s engineering operations, said the Disney special-effects division excelled in “the creative misapplication of high-technology,” a joking reference to its skill at designing entertainment projects.

“We were able to take everything we learned at Disney about entertainment and take it to otherwise serious environments,” said Fuller, who first ventured into water effects as a child by building a brightly lighted fish pond in his back yard, using parts torn out of an old washing machine.

“We have gone in a totally different direction from the kinds of water features we were doing for Disney, and from traditional fountains as well,” he said.

Donahue Schriber, a Southern California shopping center development firm, contacted WET to build two such features at Newport Beach Fashion Island.

“We have to be in the entertainment business when it comes to shopping malls,” said Pat Donahue, senior vice president of Donahue Schriber. “We wanted to sit down with WET and come up with some ideas for a water element that customers would enjoy. And the customers love it.”

The Music Center fountain has also proved to be a successful project. WET renovated the fountain area in 1986, removing a pool that had surrounded the center’s Jacques Lipchitz sculpture since the mid-1960s.

“It’s spectacular,” said John Dunavent, the center’s executive vice president. “It serves our purpose in that it draws people to the plaza--people who would never have come there otherwise. We’ve even had whole families set up out there to have picnics by the water.”

WET designers believe that people should be able to walk up to their fountains without barriers. No railings keep passersby out of their outdoor or indoor fountains.

Demand for indoor fountains prompted Fuller and Robinson to make Jim Hill, a former architect with interior design expertise, WET’s executive vice president of design in 1990. Architects and developers commission WET projects when they need water features to fit certain locations or moods.

WET’s custom fountains cost from $300,000 to more than $10 million, depending on the project and its complexity. WET charges its clients for the construction costs and adds an additional 10% to 15% for its work.

The firm attracts many clients because its features cannot be duplicated. The firm holds 32 patents for fire and water fountains, compressed-air fountains, water games and water lighting.

One of WET’s exclusives is laminar fluid flow technology, a way of controlling water that Fuller developed as an undergraduate thesis. It’s used at the Crossroads Atrium in the City of Industry, where clear tubes of water arch from an unseen nozzle in one pond and disappear into another pond without splashing. Laminar flow eliminates turbulence from the water, seemingly changing it to glass.

In WET’s infancy, American clients kept the company busy. But times have changed, and WET is looking overseas to maintain its growth.

“There’s very little building going on here right now,” Robinson said. “Most of our U.S. projects are very small.”

Malls, office buildings and civic centers provide the bulk of WET’s domestic business. Medical centers also use the fountains to make their facilities more human. Declining shopping areas have used splashy water features to revive their interiors and draw more customers.

One survey said that 30% of the people in Newport Beach Fashion Island’s center court came there to see the two WET fountains, Fuller said.

Nonetheless, the U.S. economic downturn has forced the firm to look for more clients abroad. WET fountains now flow in Japan, Korea, Australia, England, France, Mexico and several Middle Eastern countries.

“We definitely felt the recession,” Fuller said. “About three years ago, we were 50-50 foreign and domestic projects. Now it’s more like 80 overseas and 20 here.”

Fuller recently returned from a three-week trek to Southeast Asia, where he talked with representatives of a Thailand department store and resort developers in Indonesia, and explored projects suggested by the mayor of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

“I think that Southeast Asia’s going to be a terrific market for quite a while,” said Fuller, who also plans to test the waters in South America.

In a bid to attract clients with smaller budgets, WET also developed WaterMagic kits--pre-assembled packages complete with pipes, pavement stones, nozzles and instructions. Six kits, with names like Liquid Labyrinth and PopJet Playground, are available for $100,000 to $300,000.

And despite current budget cutbacks in many cities, Hill predicted more civic business in WET’s future.

“There must be improved conditions in urban centers,” Hill said. “There will have to be civic projects. I think our market will improve in the next five years.”