Making a Spectacle: ‘Splash’ Exhibit Traces Origins of Waterworks

Manufactured fountains have been refreshing, amazing and amusing people since before the 15th century, a new exhibition in New York City shows.

“Fountains: Splash and Spectacle,” a selection of about 250 drawings, prints, photographs and videos--just right for summer vacation viewing--is at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum through Oct. 11.

Fountains, created to satisfy the simple human need for clean water, quickly became associated with politics, mythology, memory, power, propaganda, art, commerce and other cultural phenomena, exhibition curator Marilyn Symmes says.

Such connections are explored in the exhibit and in a companion book, “Fountains: Splash and Spectacle: Water and Design From the Renaissance to the Present” (Rizzoli, $60 hardcover), edited by Symmes, the museum’s curator of drawings and prints.

The book is a fine alternative for those who miss the exhibit. It is full of detail about and images of fountains.

Both exhibit and book give a clear account of the history of fountain-making from the 15th century to the present.

Among celebrated modern waterworks is the Fountain of Nations at Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., opened in 1982. Four miles of pipes and 35 miles of electrical wire support a water show that sends almost 30,000 gallons of water cascading down tiered walls while hundreds of jets propel more water into the air, all synchronized with music from Disney movie soundtracks.

Early fountain designers relied mainly on gravity instead of electricity and computers as at Epcot. Yet they too achieved spectacular effects.

At the Villa d’Este, built outside Rome around 1568, the Water Organ Fountain combines dramatic displays with a water-driven organ concert. The Avenue of the Hundred Fountains is ornamented with 100 individual water sprays.

The fountains at Villa d’Este, once a private home, included a collection of active jokes in which a jet could suddenly shoot up from a grotto floor or flood a bench of visitors. (Now that the Villa d’Este is a public museum, the jokes have been turned off, perhaps recognizing a changed concept of humor.)

There is also a domestic side to the world’s love affair with moving waters. Inexpensive fountains are increasingly popular in home gardens and sun rooms.

Small table and wall-mounted fountains as well as birdbaths with recirculating pumps, water tubs and novelties such as a stone with water spurting out of it can be purchased in garden centers and through mail-order catalogs.

“Home use of water features has been growing in the United States,” said Meg Smith, of Gardener’s Supply Co., Burlington, Vt.

The company’s catalog offers about eight types of fountains powered by electric recirculating pumps that plug into an ordinary electrical outlet and circulate the small quantity of water necessary for operation.

“Part of the attraction is the sound of the water. Another element is having water in a place where you wouldn’t expect to see it,” Smith said.

Wealthy moguls around the turn of the century went in for fountains in a big way, acquiring antiques in Europe for the gardens of their country estates. If an original was not available, a copy could be commissioned.

At Kykuit, John D. Rockefeller’s country place in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., a replica of Giambologna’s Fountain of Oceanus, made for the Boboli Gardens of Florence in 1567, was installed in 1913 at a cost of $60,000.

The middle-class gained access to mass-produced fountains toward the end of the 19th century. The 1873 catalog of American cast-iron manufacturer J. L. Mott offered a selection of ready-made nozzles capable of producing jetting sprays and twirling patterns.

Old fountains are again popular.

“I have just come back from France with three antique fountains for a client’s garden and an indoor garden room,” said decorator Beverly Ellsley of Westport, Conn.

Modern versions offer lower cost, easy installation and simplicity of operation.

“We like to sell something that can sit on someone’s deck and be assembled fast so you can have a water garden in an afternoon,” Smith said.

* Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, is at 2 E. 91st St., New York. Hours: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday; 10-5 Wednesday through Saturday, noon-5 Sunday.

* Gardener’s Supply Co.: (800) 955-3370.