In this city, even water can put on a big show

In a beige, squat building in a beige, squat portion of Sun Valley, magic is at work. Two arcing streams of water, so perfectly formed they look like glass, are lighted from within. Now red and blue, now green and yellow, they come together and send colored sparks flying. Behind them, more water splashes down a multi-terraced wall; under a spotlight it becomes a cascade of diamonds. Look here, and a single jet fountain sends bursts of water in the air that, descending, bubble out like jellyfish. Look there, and a cluster of colored tubes spits out single plops of water in turn, like dancing gumballs. Then the lights go out and another fountain appears, the water rising shoulder high, sort of boring, until, whoosh, a small tower of flame rises through it, holding steady and bright, unquenchable -- a single column of opposing forces. If fire sprouting through water falls into the category of contradictory phenomena, well, that’s just a drop in the bucket. This is the research and development lab of WET Design, a company that creates water fountains. Not communal bubblers for thirsty tourists, nor damp plaza statuary with the requisite koi swimming over algae-dimmed dimes. WET stands for Water Entertainment Technology, which should tell you something, and is headquartered in Universal City, which should tell you something else, and was co-founded by an engineer who formerly worked for Disney, which goes far in explaining the whole thing.

What WET creates are waterscapes, water spectacles and “vertical water expressions,” hundreds of them, from Glendale to Hong Kong, from Bloomington, Ill., to Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. This is the company that designed and constructed the caldron raised for last year’s Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, a futuristic tower, part fountain, part flame, that now has a permanent home at Olympic Cauldron Park in Rice-Eccles Stadium.

All this sprung from the city of borrowed water, the land of the nonexistent rainfall, the ever-shrinking snow pack. Water is destiny, as Mr. Mulholland found, especially when it’s shot 150 feet in the air in front of the Bellagio hotel.

You’ve been looking at WET designs for years now: The mini-geysers in the middle of the Music Center, the terraced lagoon at the California Plaza Watercourt, the interactive jets at Universal CityWalk and, most recently, the multihued, multitalented fountain at the Grove.

Really, you have not lived until you have stood with several hundred black-clad development girls and their dates, watching the water jets dance to the dulcet tones of Dino singing “That’s Amore.”

A student thesis

It began, strangely enough, with an honors undergraduate thesis on “axisymmetric laminar fluid flow,” which is almost as sexy as it sounds. Mark Fuller, a civil engineering student at the University of Utah, described turbulence-free water projection that produces a seemingly motionless arch. Fuller, who then went on to get a master’s degree at Stanford in engineering and product design, had always wanted to work for Disney, and work there he did for six years, on special effects and water projects for Epcot Center and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

The success of the Disney parks led to a golden age of theme-park-think, and many companies were created with the hopes of making special effects more public, bringing water features and light shows and other stage secrets into airports, corporate lobbies and city plazas. Fuller co-founded WET in 1983 and, unlike many other companies of this sort, it has grown steadily, becoming an $11-million enterprise with a 110-person team made up of engineers, architects, graphic designers and people with backgrounds in special effects.

The design headquarters is in one of the big buildings fronting Universal Studios, but it could just as well be on a back lot, so perfect is the design aesthetic. Under a shining firmament of pendulum lights that hang from a very high ceiling, designers of every age and degree of intimacy with the Gap hunch over blueprints and sketches and models and computer screens. In the lobby, which is as slick and shiny as the banking establishment it once was, are various models of the Olympic caldron; on every wall hang images of water in states of ecstasy and rest.

WET Design effectively changed the meaning of the word fountain -- it perfected the interactive water event. Its fountains may be entered by those without “Il Dolce Vita” pretensions, and its air-jet propulsion system makes it possible to program a whole suite of movements, with lights and music or without.

The R&D; lab, called WET Labs, is where the fun stuff happens, where new water toys are tested and dreamed up. Here, Keith Kalis explains it all -- it’s the laminar flow that allows the light to pour through the arches of water as if they were fiber optic tubes, and it’s the natural properties of water that allow the colors to be so perfectly mixed. Kalis is a former rocket scientist -- yes, really -- who spent 15 years on Edwards Air Force Base. And if this job is not quite as exciting, well, it has its benefits. “There, you’d spend eight years on something, so you can push a button and it would last 20 seconds,” he says. “A great 20 seconds but still....”

Here the gratification is more instantaneous, the medium a bit more pliable. Besides, while military technology is most often considered a necessary evil, who doesn’t love a really good “vertical water experience”?

“I call this the liquid baby sitter,” he says, pointing to the colored columns of the “pop jet.” “Kids can look at this thing for hours.”

Outside, he sets the Mini- Shooter, which sends 5 gallons of water 150 feet into the air, and the SuperShooter, which sends 55 gallons 200 feet.

It’s hard to imagine what people a few streets away, heading to the 5 or Victory Boulevard, think when, over their shoulders, they see an enormous spume of water in the air, as if a blue whale were rising and blowing hard in Sun Valley.

But after seeing water that sparks like fire and fire that defies water, a landlocked blue whale wouldn’t be all that surprising.