The Genesis Of Garden Fountains
The Genesis Of Garden Fountains The incredible construction of a fountain allows it to provide clean water or shoot water high into air for dramatic effect and it can also serve as an excellent design feature to complete your home.The central purpose of a fountain was originally strictly practical. People in cities, towns and villages received their drinking water, as well as water to bathe and wash, via aqueducts or springs nearby. Up to the late 19th century, water fountains had to be near an aqueduct or reservoir and higher than the fountain so that gravity could make the water flow downwards or shoot high into the air. Acting as an element of decoration and celebration, fountains also provided clean, fresh drinking water. Animals or heroes made of bronze or stone masks were often times utilized by Romans to beautify their fountains. Muslims and Moorish garden designers of the Middle Ages included fountains to re-create smaller models of the gardens of paradise. King Louis XIV of France wanted to illustrate his dominion over nature by including fountains in the Gardens of Versailles. The Romans of the 17th and 18th centuries created baroque decorative fountains to glorify the Popes who commissioned them as well as to mark the location where the restored Roman aqueducts entered the city.
Indoor plumbing became the main source of water by the end of the 19th century thereby limiting urban fountains to mere decorative elements. Fountains using mechanical pumps instead of gravity allowed fountains to provide recycled water into living spaces as well as create unique water effects.
Beautifying city parks, honoring people or events and entertaining, are some of the purposes of modern-day fountains.
The Dispersion of Fountain Design Innovation
The Dispersion of Fountain Design Innovation The circulated reports and illustrated books of the day contributed to the evolution of scientific innovation, and were the primary means of dissiminating useful hydraulic information and water feature ideas all through Europe. An internationally renowned innovator in hydraulics in the later part of the 1500's was a French fountain designer, whose name has been lost to history. His competence in creating gardens and grottoes with integrated and brilliant water fountains began in Italy and with commissions in Brussels, London and Germany. The publication, “The Principles of Moving Forces,” written near the end of his lifetime in France, turned into the definitive writing on hydraulic mechanics and engineering.