Rethinking The Fountain

"Once upon a time—and not so long ago as all that—if you planned on splashing water around in a decorative manner, you were expected to provide a basin in which the water could be collected afterward. In a long, rich history reaching back to the Rome of emperors and aqueducts, fountains had always had basins. The Trevi Fountain, in Rome; the Apollo Fountain, at Versailles; and the Buckingham Fountain, in Chicago—they all have basins.

But basins can leak, becoming maintenance headaches. In the early 1980s, Harvard University was contemplating a new fountain. Derek Bok, then the president, noted that a number of campus fountains had ended up as planters, and he wondered if the designer, Peter Walker, could come up with a solution. Mr. Walker did just that—by getting rid of the basin and simply grading the site so that the water ran toward the drains. It was a solution so obvious, and so good, that you have to wonder why no one had thought of it before. Plenty of people have thought of it since, of course—fountains everywhere now take advantage of Mr. Walker’s fountain-design advance.

Now the American Society of Landscape Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are honoring the Harvard fountain—the Tanner Fountain—with the 2008 Landmark Award."