2011 was a really busy year for me. Between landscape projects and travel, I have been working diligently on getting our 1907 early Craftsman house cleaned out. Let’s just say we had a lot of stuff we didn’t need.

In July we had (5) dump trucks worth of “stuff” removed from under our house and taken to the dump.  There was a 100 year accumulation of building materials (80 rusty paint cans, crates of rotten books, a parade of old furniture, cat poop, etc.). The front lawn looked like an episode of Hoarders for a few days as we sorted through all this stuff. The neatest thing we found was a dog permit from the 1930′s. I am happy to say we got rid of about 98% of it.

St. Vincent de Paul has come out (9) times to pick up furniture and boxes of household stuff (see photo of one pile above). It has gotten to the point I have them on speed dial on my phone.

Then we had a garage sale to get rid of some bulky items.  On top of that I have posted well over (50) items on Craigslist this year. There was a tandem bike, building supplies, lap tops, routers, servers, endless amounts of furniture, weights, clothing, plants, etc. I even got some guy to come dig all the rose bushes out of our yard – for free on Craigslist.

I still have a few more things to get rid of but I am 95% done clearing the place out. Now we get to focus on the fun stuff — the garden and landscape in 2012!

If you are interested in bread making I recommend getting the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François. This is the main reference book I use for bread making. They have a strategy where you make up large batches of dough and save part of it in the refrigerator for up to two week. When you want to make bread you just pull out some pre-made dough and form it. Super easy. We have been really happy with the quality of the breads.

They also have a bread making blog at artisanbreadinfive.com.

I made 10 loaves of this olive fougasse last Sunday for a food exchange.

The project is a collaboration between Mia Lehrer + Associates and WET Design. The linear interactive water feature is meant to represents the Los Angeles River where it meets up with the historic Arroyo Secco. Come check it out. It is right next to Home Depot under the highway.

LINK: Watch Video of Confluence Park fountain

On my recent trip to Bali, Indonesia I fell in love with the quirky street fountains and water gardens. Often small and in front of shops, the water features are usually home made but have ambitious design concepts. The features alone are small, but taken together as a street scape you feel as though you are walking through a much larger urban water garden.

This is a micro water garden in front of a nail salon in Kuta where they do fish tank pedicures. Water bubbles out of the two tiny rectangular plinths. Notice how they extended the geometry of their water garden with the paving. The whole garden is less than 1.5m square.

A small sculptural fountain built into the sidewalk in front of a shop. The fountain is only about 1m high. In the US we would probably think of this as a residential or large table top fountain but here it is built into the street scape which gives it a greater sense of monumentality.

This fountain with an overflowing vessel is located in front of a fine textile dealer in Ubud. The sound of water fountains can be heard on many Balinese streets.

A spiggot on the fountain let’s them water the grass and other plants in their front courtyard directly from the fountain.

PVC pipe and a garden hose create a pretty ambitious water wall on the front windows of this massage parlor.

A large ceramic vessel overflowing with water sits in a nook between building along a major street in downtown Ubud. The water was a little bit funky, but the display of water running off the lip of the vessel was gorgeous and surprising regular. The strong sound of the water curtain could be heard from two store fronts away.

Bali is criss-crossed with channels of all sizes, many larger than small runnel in a shopping district.  Intended for irrigation and drainage, this channel has been transformed into a water feature with the addition of a stone sculpture of a woman (with a vessel) at the water’s edge and the adjacent seating area.

Located 1/2 a block from Kuta Beach, along the sidewalk at the south edge of the Hard Rock Cafe Hotel, this feature combines large architectural water walls,  rain curtains and geysers. Ambitious in scale, this feature becomes a focal point for the whole block and creates a small public space as people gather in front of it.

I love the strong connection between water and vegetation in the fountains in Bali. Almost every time a water element is present there are plants flourishing nearby. Often times, in the United States I feel that we forget to include (or intentionally exclude) plants in large scale water feature designs. On that note, I’ll post more photos of Balinese temple and garden fountains next week.

A lot of people have asked what our ceremony was like so I thought I would give you the play by play breakdown of a traditional Balinese blessing ceremony.

The Balinese Blessing Ceremony

1. The Mangku (priest) rings a small bell to speak to the God (in Sanskrit mantra) that today a sacred wedding is about to be performed. He rings the bell for a couple of minutes.

2. The bride and groom receive this Balinese dadap leaf, holy water, and burnt rice, which means purification and cleansing of the body and the spirit. The assistant priest then burns 3 stalks of bamboo on fire to symbolize the burning of any sinful past as individuals by the God Brahma (Batara Brahma).

3. The bride and groom receive holy water on their chests to purify and prepare their hearts for a blessed marriage.

4. The bride and groom receives coconut water on their heads using a palm leaf (3 times), and their hands to drink (3 times), and then on their hand to wipe on top of their heads (1 time). Disclaimer: Patty only pretended to “wash” her face so she didn’t mess up her make-up.

5. Muspa- The bride and groom pray:

a. Putting both hands together and raise between eyebrows.
b. Muspa Puyung: Praying without holding flowers. This is to concentrate and centralize all the senses to ask Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa (the highest God) for purity of the soul.
c. The first Muspa: Holding flowers between the two hands and raising them between the eyebrows. This is to ask Dewa Surya (the God of the Sun) to share with us His compassionate radiance to the people of the world.
d. The second Muspa: Holding ‘Kwangen’ (little flower arrangement) between the two hands and raising them between the eyebrows. This is to ask the specific God of the Padmasana (this small tower/temple protecting the hotel) so that we will always be protected and safe.
e. The third Muspa: Using similar ‘Kwangen’ to pray to all the holy Gods and Goddesses to always give us happiness and health.
f. Muspa Puyung (similar to point b above): To show gratitude for everything that we have, every blessing of life that we have received until now.

6. The assistant priest takes floral water using a coconut shell and pours on a bamboo cylinder, symbolizing straining all the past shadows of wrongdoings. The bride and groom then drink this water.

7. The groom and bride receive rice on their foreheads.

8. The bride and groom then eat treats from the offerings.

And that’s it. That is the ceremony.

Then headed upstairs to our private terrace and had out wedding feast. The menu we pre-selected consisted of tofu curry, chicken satay, corn cakes, braised red bean & young papaya in Balinese spices, fragrant yellow rice and coconut crepes with banana filling and gula merah. It was excellent.

PHOTO CREDIT: www.TonnyTrisnawan.com

Jonathan and I eloped and were married May 20th, 2010 in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.

The ceremony was in the garden of the Indus restaurant/hotel in Ubud. We wore traditional Balinese wedding garments. The ceremony was a traditional Hindu Balinese marriage blessing full of flowers, rice, incense and offerings. It was incredibly beautiful.

This illustration gives the Balinese names for all the garments and accessories that made up the wedding outfits. You can’t tell in the picture above, but Jonathan had a sword suck into the back of his garment, just like the guy in illustration.

My headdress took about 90 minutes for the hairdresser to build out of 75+ metal ornaments. It was very heavy and sharp, but totally glam.

A lot of people have asked us about the ceremony. I’ll post more on that soon.

Detail of the survey: I posted a link to the online survey on Facebook and on a number of industry related forums on LinkedIn and Land8Lounge.  To my delight I got a number of responses (80+), but not everyone actually took the official survey. I received additional responses to the first question, “What is your favorite fountain?” via Tweets, emails, Facebook, etc. The question also sparked some lively discussions in several of the online forums. The survey was open to the public, but because of the places I posted it, the majority of the respondents were landscape architects, urban planners, architects and people in the water feature industry. I admit this is not the most scientific study, but I hope people find the results interesting and that it continues to generate a dialogue.

The drum roll please… here are the most favorite:

#07: THE PINEAPPLE FOUNTAIN

Location: Charleston, VA | Designer: Stuart O. Dawson,  Sasaki Associates with Edward Pinckney Associates | Year: 1990

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau

Survey Comments:

• “The pineapple represents the southern symbol of hospitality.” – survey response

Links:

Waterfront Park Charleston

#06: THE MUSTANGS OF LAS COLINAS

Location: Irving, Texas | Designer: Robert Glen with SWA | Year: 1976-1984

Links:
Mustangs of Las Colinas

#05: The Dubai Fountain, Burj Khalifa

Location: Dubai, UAE | Designer: Andrea Silva, WET Design | Date: 2009

Survey Comments:

“For sheer power and size, I’d go for the Dubai Fountain. It’s akin to three Bellagio’s side by side. And you can feel the throb (or is it a boom) every time it shoots its highest pulse/stream.” – R.F. Land8 forum

“The Burj fountain. Its dramatic movements, sounds, and powerful song selection gives a person chills when they watch it….. and its absolutely unforgettable!” – J.M. LinkedIn Fountain Design forum

Links:

The Dubai Fountain – Wikipedia

#04: Fort Worth Water Gardens, Fort Worth, Texas

Location: Fort Worth Convention Center | Designer: Phillip Johnson and John Burgee | Date: 1974

Links:

Fort Worth Water Garden – Wikipedia

#03: Paley Park, NYC

Location: Midtown Manhattan | Designer: Zion & Breene -  Landscape Architects | Date: 1967

Survey Comments:
This feature got a number of votes but no one commented on why they voted for it. I would speculate that people are primarily drawn to the sound of the water wall in Paley Park. What do you think?

Links:

Paley Park – Wikipedia

Paley Park – Yelp review

#02: The Fountains of the Bellagio

Location: Las Vegas | Designer: Claire Kahn Tuttle, WET Design | Date: 1997

Survey Comments:

“Probably the one at the Bellagio. Yeah, I know I’m supposed to scoff at it as a landscape architect, but I love how it works!” – survey response

Links:

Fountains of the Bellagio – Wiki

Fountains of the Bellagio – Yelp

#01: Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain, Levi Plaza

Location: Portland. Oregon | Designer: Angela Danadjieva, Lawrence Halprin & Associates  | Date: 1970

Survey Comments:

“The Lawerence Halprin fountain at Levi’s Plaza in San Francisco, for the look, sense of discovery it fosters, and especially the sound.” – L.R. LinkedIn ASLA forum

“I’m a pretty big fan of Halprins ‘fountains’/water features. Too bad we really cant design places like those anymore thanks to initiatives like CPTED…d’oh!..forgot this is a fountains discussion.” – N. A. Land8 forum

Links:

Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain – Wikipedia

Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain >> whereintheworldispatty.com

Thoughts + Observations

Historic Water Features:
I was surprised that all the top favorite fountains were under 45 years old. There were a number of historic fountains, such as Trevi, Villa d’Este, and Buckingham Fountain that received a few votes. But collectively they did not rank very high on the survey. Considering how well known and venerated they seem to be, I found it a bit surprising. It makes me want to investigate how people relate to historic water features in modern cities and how they may function differently as they get older.

Sculptural Fountains:
The Pineapple Fountain and the Mustangs of Las Colinas illustrate that sculptural water features continue to be popular with the public and highly iconic. I wasn’t personally familiar with the Pineapple Fountain before this survey. A Google search for the Pineapple Fountain brought up a surprising number of artist paintings depicting the fountain. You can even buy bookmarks depicting the Pineapple Fountain on Etsy. The symbolism of sculptural fountains is often regional, as is the case in both of these fountains.

Show Features:
No big surprise here. The results of the survey confirm that people love huge musical water features. The Fountains of the Bellagio and the Dubai Fountain got high points for their emotional impact, scale and strength. They offer a unique collective experience on a large scale. Sometimes criticized for using a lot of water, these fountains are a guilty pleasure for many people. I loved the comment from the landscape architect who said that he knows that he shouldn’t like the Fountains of the Bellagio but that he does anyway.

Also noteworthy, is that the Dubai Fountain is less than a year old and already ranked in the top 7. I have a hunch that only a huge musical fountain could enter our collective consciousness and become an international favorite so quickly.

Waterscapes:
Going into this, I wondered if one of the huge musical features would get the most votes. The answer was no. Remarkably a gravity fed waterscape in Portland got more votes than any other fountain in the world.  Admittedly a knock-out water feature, the Forecourt Fountain was described in 1970, as “One of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance”.  Forecourt Fountain and the Fort Worth Water Garden, offer highly immersive, interactive experiences that are abstractions of how water works in the natural world. Waterscapes aren’t fountains to look at, but rather offer watery places to be.

The fact that Forecourt got so many votes indicates that an immersive experience can have the same kind of draw and fame as an iconic water feature. This should be encouraging to people trying to bring these types of experiences to their cities and projects. The challenge, as several people pointed out, is that it would be very difficult to build a water feature like Forecourt Fountain today due to safety and litigation concerns. Notably, the Fort Worth Water Garden has been redesigned to make it shallower after 4 people drown in 2004. While safety is a serious issue, there have been many successful interactive water features and waterscapes built in the last twenty years.

Personally, I think that we will see a lot more waterscapes built in cities in the coming decades. Globally people are being asked to make increased sacrifices regarding their personal water use  (i.e. use less water, don’t water lawns, don’t hose down your driveway, don’t fill your swimming pool, etc.) Urban waterscapes offer a public place for people of all ages to to come together around water communally. I speculate there will be more demand for these types of collective experience with water, when water inevitably becomes more expensive.

Also
The survey also asked what special memories people associated with fountains and what they think the most famous fountain is in their city or country. I’ll discuss these topics in future blog posts.

+There were also a handful of interesting off-the-beaten-path fountains that people nominated. I’ll write more about them soon.

What is your favorite fountain? Why?

We parked on the Square and were walking down a side street looking for Coffee Hound when we stumbled upon this building (see image below). I was flabbergasted. It was like seeing a ghost of a person you have only seen in a photo. I knew in an instant that this was the old Klemm Overall Factory!

My great-great-great grandfather C.W. Klemm owned a number of businesses including the Klemm Overall Factory. It was once the main competitor with Levi Strauss.  Sadly, Klemm’s continued to focus on overalls exclusively while Levi Strauss started expanding into denim pants (aka blue jeans). Klemm was eventually put out of business. (I think there is a lesson in this story…)

Anyway, I grew up my whole life thinking that this building burned down in the Great Fire of 1900.  My Grandma Honey, Marilyn Christ Anderson, told me she donated a big pile of half melted together overall buttons from the fire to the McLean County Historical Society decades ago. They must have had multiple buildings.

I inherited two pictures of the building (see below).

This is a picture of the upstairs sewing room at the factory. It kinda looks like the American Apparel of the 1880′s. These days the upstairs is being used by some club that runs model railroads. I would love to visit that the next time we in town.

I eventually pulled myself away from taking pictures of the overall factory (I think Jonathan thought I was a bit over excited) and we found Coffee Hound nearby. While not quite Intelligensia, it was a great place.  I love their old time store front, with high ceiling and original mosaic floors.  We will definitely be back when we are in town.

15 Assignments
The following independent assignments will take most people 2-6 months to complete. Try to do them in order, starting a new one each week. Don’t get overwhelmed by seeing them all here in a list. Most of them are really fun to do. The things you discover in one assignment will help inform the later exercises. Some, due to their nature, may be ongoing and overlap with some of the others. You will want to make a physical folder or notebook to keep your notes, assignments and ongoing lists in one place. Try to have fun.

01. Find your Strengths
A. Take the Briggs-Myer Type Indicator personality inventory and review results.  You can take it online for between $30-50.

B. Buy the book  StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book comes with a code in the back to log onto a website and take the Strengths test online. The website will automatically generate a multi-page report of your strengths for you to review.

02. Pursue your Passions
Make a list of 10 places in your city that you want to take yourself on fieldtrips. For the next 10 weeks pick one each weekend to visit.
Tip: Make a Google map to record all the places you want to go, add things to it on an ongoing basis. You can share it with friends, too!

03. Clean House
Purge 100 things out of your life to allow room for new things. Keep a list of what you have purged.

04. Happy List
Identify what picks you up when you are really down. Make a list of ideas and if you like, write yourself a letter and put it in a place that you will easily be able to find it when you need it.
Tip: Consider sharing your Happy List with your closest friends and family.

05. Identify People to Pull Closer
Make a list of people you want to reach out to and then brainstorm how you can pull them closer.

Tip 1: Read Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazz.

Tip 2: Make a habit each Monday to review your schedule and set up at least one lunch date a week.

Tip 3: Everyone can throw a dinner parties. Or start a book club, salon, bowling club, support group, organize outings or events, etc. Having something to invite people to makes it easy to “Pull” people.

06. Ideal Days
Make a list of all the ideal days that you can imagine for yourself.

07. Values
Make 10 word clusters (3 words each) to define your values.

08. Goals
Based on what you have discovered through Strengths, Ideal Days, the Value exercise, etc. write a series of long and short-term goals. If you already have written goals then use this time to update them. Make them very specific. Then once you have the list break them down into steps to achieve goals.
Tip: Brainstorm way to automatically see your goals everyday.

09. Visualize Goals
Pick 10 images that inspire you to achieve your goals, it could be people, it could be stuff, or ideas. Put them somewhere where to will see them everyday and at the right time.

10. Energy
Identify 5 ways for you to gain more energy and work them into your daily routine.

11. Finance
Review you finances and identify your weaknesses/bad habits. Brainstorm ways to protect yourself from these bad habits.

Tip: Great finance blogs for people in 20’s and 30’s:

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/

Tip: One of the best things you can do for your finances, social life, health and state of mind is to learn to cook. Cooking reaps many rewards.

12. Get a Cause
Identify one important cause that you can passionately support. Join related organizations and start educating yourself on topics related to the cause so that you can be a knowledgeable advocate on that subject.

13. Build a Folder of High Achievement
Get a folder or notebook you like; an Itoya works well for this exercise. Fill the notebook with all kinds of documents that demonstrate your high achievement, you at your best.

Ideas: Recommendations, acceptance letters, resumes, awards, diplomas, creative achievements that you are particularly proud of, things you have written, business cards from all the jobs you have had, press clipping about you, speeches you have given, particularly flattering pictures, bios, etc. Continue to add to it over time. Look at it frequently to remind yourself of your history of success. Before doing that require you to be at your best, flip through the book to boost your confidence.

14. Make Time
Set aside some time every week and time monthly to look at what is coming up so that you can be best prepared and proactive for everything coming up. Use monthly reviews as a time to start a yearly calendar.

15. Time Machine
Identify something you did at some point in your past that you really enjoyed but you stopped doing. Find a way to start doing it again, maybe with a new spin.

Well, and then what? If you are still going strong, kudos to you! You are an even more fabulous version of yourself. Some of these assignments are things you will have to continue to work on in perpetuity. Life is 80% maintenance. Some of these exercises are things you will need to do again from time to time. Keep them so that you can revisit them in future.

Moving forward, challenging yourself, identify an area that you want to become an expert in and develop that expertise. Offer to mentor others, brainstorm ways in which you can contribute to the various communities that already belong and consider creating new communities and organization to serve unmet needs, etc.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain