Water Creations Spring From Edge of the Desert

When architects and developers need a fountain to grace a new plaza or shopping center, their search often takes them to a place better known for droughts than downpours: Southern California.

The region is home to a small but growing industry composed of designers and manufacturers that have benefited from worldwide demand for ever more complex and spectacular “water features”--the industry term for everything from fountains to artificial lakes and streams.

The industry’s growing sophistication has raised the expectations of builders and the public alike by using new technologies and materials to manipulate water in unexpected ways.

At the new Bellagio hotel-casino in Las Vegas, Wet Design of Universal City created one of the most complex water features ever built: an eight-acre lake featuring 1,000 computer-controlled fountains that have been “choreographed” to perform to music and light. Estimated cost: $40 million.

People “from the design community ask us to do things that are more and more spectacular,” said Hugh Hughes, head of the Anaheim-based water-features operations of Valley Crest, a giant landscape design and construction firm. “People want to be entertained.”

Many in the water features business have worked long and hard to win the respect from peers in the design and construction fields, where fountains were often mere afterthoughts selected out of supply catalogs. So, it’s no wonder that water-features designers, engineers and manufacturers are never shy about praising and expressing the greatest of respect for the most common element on earth.

“We don’t want water to do what it doesn’t want to do,” said Claire Tuttle, director of design at Wet Design, recognized as an innovator in fountain design and technology. “We celebrate and honor it.”

Architects and builders have long relied on fountains to create focal points or meeting places that draw people. Amusement parks and resort hotels have built moneymaking fantasy worlds featuring artificial waterfalls, lagoons and streams. The water features also serve practical purposes by screening out the noise of traffic and machinery.

In Santa Monica, developer Jerry Snyder created an office complex--the Water Garden--around a series of fountains and lakes that conceal the top of a parking garage.

“It’s an aesthetic and a practical feature,” said Costa Mesa architect Carl McLarand, who designed the Water Garden. “It became a central focus for the office buildings . . . and calls attention to the development.”

Today’s fountain designers have also tried to correct the shortcomings and failings of earlier fountains by developing new plumbing systems, chemicals and materials that keep water clean and flowing. “You can go to plenty of places where the fountain has become a planter,” Hughes said of trouble-prone water features.

Now, many water features include wind monitors that prevent onlookers from getting soaked. As a result, a 25-foot tall gusher of water automatically shrinks to a modest-sized display in a gust of wind.

“There have been huge advances in technology,” said Lance Friesz, vice president of marketing for Irvine-based Rock & Waterscape Systems Inc., which created an acrylic tube that allows the guests at a Bahamas resort to ride a stream of water through a shark tank.

Many of the Southern California firms are rooted in the amusement and theme park business, where water has played an important role in entertaining guests. The predecessor firm of Rock & Waterscape Systems, for example, was involved in the now-defunct Busch Gardens in Van Nuys. The founder of Wet Design, Mark Fuller, got his start creating fountains for Walt Disney Co. theme parks.

Fuller and his partners at Wet Design--which employs more than 100 people--is widely recognized as a leader in introducing new technology and designs into the water-features business. The firm has designed new jets and valves that make water appear like transparent tubes of glass. Children at shopping centers across the nation can be seen trying to catch the small blobs of water emitted by Wet Design’s “pop-jet” fountains.

In downtown Los Angeles, guests at the Los Angeles Music Center have been known to run through a Wet Design fountain that features columns of water that suddenly appear and disappear from the ground. A similar challenge greets visitors to Universal City Walk.

Los Angeles architect Rick Keating teamed up with Wet Design to find a way to brighten up what could have been a gloomy, narrow lobby of Gas Co. Tower, a 55-story skyscraper in downtown’s financial district. Wet’s solution was to build rows of jets into the lobby floor and cover them with glass, which permits visitors to observe and walk over the mini-geysers of water that pulse on and off.

“We wanted light to bounce around and reflect in the lobby, and water was high on agenda [to make that happen]” Keating said. At Hollywood & Highland, a massive retail and entertainment project, Wet Design is creating a giant water wall that will highlight the distant vista of the famed Hollywood sign, said Jack Illes, vice president of strategic design for the project’s developer, TrizecHahn.

“Instead of tacking [a fountain] on as an ornament, it’s an integral part of the work,” said Illes of Wet Design’s philosophy. “They try to think of ways that water can be incorporated in meaningful, honest ways.”

Perhaps the most important innovation that has been introduced by Wet Design is the notion that it’s OK for people to get wet--a liability concern of many landlords.

“We knew what water could do,” Fuller said. “It’s all about challenging the trite ways people have about dealing with water.”