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Basic constituent like endocarp and water reach us on a gut floor . A effervescent fountain can magnetize us for hour . But distinctive outflow , though worthy landscape features , can be problematical for institutions when it come to maintaining them . Take the outflow of Harvard University in Cambridge , Massachusetts , for representative . Over the years , weewee features were install with the well - mean intention of enhancing the campus . But always , once the chore of keeping them white and course became a grind , criminal maintenance workers would attempt to alleviate some of their burden by breaking the bottoms , take them with crap and planting them . natural spring ? What fountain ? Look at the pretty flowers !
So when Harvard President of the United States Derek Bok commission a new fountain , he required that it be make so that , indeed , it remained a fountain . The result was Tanner Fountain , a basinless musical arrangement that show to be groundbreaking — so much so that it advance the 2008 Landmark Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation . Completed in 1984 , it was the first institutional project in the Landscape as Art drift , and it continue to exemplify the lap of the two study .
Designed by landscape painting designer Peter Walker of SWA Group base in Berkeley , California , the 60 - animal foot - diam round of 159 stones , localize in a loosely concentric fashion , come forth primordially from the basis , with piss beget at the center by 32 nozzles . The lead shallow , ground - stage pool with its hovering mist has become a gathering place , a vacation spot , a Zen - alike respite from the labors of academia . And it ’s not a see - it - once experience . The fountain has many faces — refracting rainbow through the mist on sunny summer day , light at night , shrouded in steam from the heating plant in winter , dusted with snow .
Each of the stones — by-product of clearing New England cultivated land at the turn of this past century — is a sizable 2 base by 4 foot , but bury so that only 16 to 18 inch of their open is above ground . buck tradition , the fountain is not centered or placed along an axis of rotation but range an interface between asphalt walkway and lawn and encompass two tree . Aesthetically it connects construct and instinctive human race , and melds constituent and artful , primeval and New . In the humanity of fountain designing , even after 20 years , Tanner Fountain is still outside the box , sophisticated in its simplicity , but succeeding because it is also engaging , drawing passersby into its inner circle .
For more data on Tanner Fountain and the other 2008 ASLA award winners , seeasla.org/awards/2008/08winners .
