E A U create - Featured: Fountain with no Water

E A U create Evolution.Arch.Urbanismstrategy and designNew York

Featured

Fountain with no Water

Water was soul to the site, reminiscent of a time being that never comes back.

It’s a “watery city", although the original delicate network of canals has gone with a wind of high-tech industrial urban competition in a decade. Now, people miss what they’ve lost.

The site is one of those industrial campuses, segregated by empty green gentrification and linear plantation as territory lines. The emotionless, bold cutting lines of landscape embody an ideology, being cut off from the past. Longing for reminiscent of the past becomes an emotional search for familiarity and security in an unpredictable, ever-changing world. People look back and look for water feature to fill in the gap of buildings and the emptiness of the past.

The entrepreneur wanted a fountain at the border of his site, fronting the other segregated industrial campus.

I asked him if he liked Carl Bohm’s “The fountain”.

"As a kid, when my piano teacher told me about it and how the performance could be, I was attached to it at once". I said, “ In the eyes of a seven-years-old, my teacher is elegant, strong, with soft voice." I continued, “She graduated from National Conservatory of music in the 1940s. Since 1957, she had left her favorite fountain garden, her favorite river, her hometown, and never returned, like your father.”

There's an image echoing in my mind: She made the music visible and I could see such a fountain in her childhood garden, secretly being revealed and alive with her bluish memory of her hometown. She said to me, “search deeply for one perception in another.” “ They always connect each other at some point, which channels to heart.” She inspired me to be aware of the surroundings, especially in chaos, and use perception to create the new order.

“May we leave the melancholy of missing part in the past? And move on to create something new, something that evolves from current situation, something that echoes your perception of the past in a different way.” I chatted and he understood. There's resonance.

A land sculpture is drawn on edge of the industrial campus. Rhythm of water flows in visual sense. The order of fountain’s melody and its visual variety compose an open end. It welcomes constant changing surroundings to be part of the site’s evolution. It is an open language to the segregated industrial campuses.

Z.J

E A U create Evolution.Arch.Urbanismstrategy and designNew York