Much of the fun strolling around (the French would say “flaner”) is looking at all the landscape amenities. As landscape architects, we also look at how they work, and how they could possibly be adapted to work in California.
Looking at amenities involves staring at objects often ignored by tourists who are more into architecture, views and selfie sticks. You get sone strange looks when you stare at objects, then start photographing them from multiple angles to possibly recreate them in a future project. Strangely, nobody asks why – or starts shooting by your side. At least they don’t shake their heads and walk away muttering.
Rustic benches, ancient stone planters and antique stone water troughs grace historic spaces. More modern benches populate more recent installations, and a state of the art people-cooler hides inside a metal grate.
Stone trough fountains often use non-reciculating water from a local source: a spring or a redirected creek. That’s a luxury we don’t often find here in the more arid west. Still, with a filter and recirculating pump, they could be adapted to work here, especially if they were filled occasionally with water recovered while waiting for the shower to heat up. Rocks could also be added to reduce water volume, although this is not something you’d likely see in France.
Oversize stone planters covered with lichens, on the other hand, are not something often seen here. We tend to prefer cast stone, a.k.a. concrete or even glasscrete for weight savings. It’s fun walking around these things, thinking about the stone carvers who shaped them long ago, and how they thought about all the details – the paving pattern, the base, the stone itself.
The “smoking manhole” is actually an intermittent misting system, a “people cooler”. The weather was hot – 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees F), so this was not just for visual effects. The mister was near a bench where people could sit and receive cool air from time to time – or jump up and run through the mist. It worked a bit like a cooling geyser, where most of the time the grate would just be an ordinary object, only to transform into a cloud of vapor as the system activated.
The juxtaposition of rustic gravel and irregular white stones with more formal cut stone and a sheared hedge separated a sitting area from a heavily-used beach access. The hedge made the upper space private, and the the four element vertical screen was much more appealing than a monolithic flat wall, as we tend to build here. Of course, a monolithic wall would cost but a fraction of the expense needed to build and maintain this barrier.