Expression in Architecture
Water in Architecture

Four hundred years ago, a wise Japanese Zen master named Sen no Rikyu designed a legendary tea garden on a dramatic cliff site overlooking the Inland Sea. Despite the spectacular view over the broad expanse of murmuring ocean, the tea master carefully planted a high screen of hedges and trees all around the garden and blocked out the vista to the sea. In front of the hedge, Rikyu placed a small stone font for washing the hands, an important prelude to the tea ritual. Just above the bowl, he clipped a tiny opening through the leaves. It was a brilliantly choreographed genuflection. As visitors knelt down to the bowl, their eyes would catch a fleeting glimpse of sea through the leaves just at the moment when their hands mingled with the cool water. The tea garden was a simple but profound experience of the limited splash of water compared with the limitless ocean, the part in humbling relation to the whole, described by Sen no Rikyu as

A bit of water here,
There, between the trees---
The sea!

The garden has long since vanished. Today, Rikyu’s legend exists, but the lesson he leaves is that, with only a scant amount of water and spirited design, all the water in the world can be called to mind.
Familiar and simple, yet enchantingly complex, water is endlessly appealing. We are compelled to stare at a river flowing under a bridge, to feel water as it sheets over the marble rim of a fountain, and to sit for hours transfixed by the sound of a gurgling stream or waves at the beach. From lost tea gardens to overgrown Umbrian villas to glitzy hotel-lobby fountains, we have persisted in using water in our built environments.
The key to understanding the water of architecture is to understand the architecture of water---what physical laws govern its behavior, how the liquid acts and reacts with our senses, and, most of all, how its symbolism relates to us a human beings. Just as the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” so too is water composed of stories, above and beyond its molecular fusion of hydrogen and oxygen. Whenever architects or designers include water in their compositions, they can plunge into a treasure chest of physical characteristics, legends, and allegories to enhance their designs. Our associations with water today have been shaped by our ancestors, so that the lapse of centuries adds to the symbolism, and the collected wisdom survives the tides of millennia.
The properties of water as it appears in nature are inviolable, since they are always restricted by a code of natural limits. Although its complex physical behavior cannot be completely explained by simple equations, knowledge of its properties is an important basis of design. Pure water is (or should be) odorless, tasteless, and colorless. Chemically, it is an oxide of hydrogen that covers about two-thirds of Earth’s surface, with nearly two-thirds of all fresh water frozen in the polar ice caps. Atmospheric-, surface-, and groundwater are critical factors in our planet’s weather systems: humidity and dew point maintain our atmosphere, ocean currents cool and warm continental temperatures and the freeze-thaw cycle locks and releases moisture in the soil.
Water phases into a solid at 32° F (O° C) and becomes a gas at 212° F (100° C). As atmospheric pressure rises or falls, the freezing and boiling temperatures of water adjust themselves in proportion. When water freezes, it distinguishes itself from most other liquids by expanding, approximately one-eleventh of its volume; when it is a liquid, water is nearly incompressible. Two forces modify the horizontal surface of water: adhesion, or the attraction between water molecules and other materials, and cohesion, the attraction of water molecules for one another. Billions of molecules join on the surface of water to form a tension (similar to a bubble’s) that always creates a small surface as possible for a body of still water. When water moves, its dynamics are controlled by complex interactions of forces, displacements, and energies. Sprays, rapids, trickles, drops, plops, and deluges are all kinetic performances choreographed by the invisible order.
Ice, liquid, and steam are the forms of water available to designers; in these three conditions, the water may move within itself, lie still, flow, steam, freeze in icicles, billow up in fog, fall down, spout up, or flake. Liquid is used most often, but solid ice and vaporous steam must also be confronted, since architecture is a part of the environment where they are commonly present. In fact, a pictorial catalogue of water phenomena would require most of the world’s scenery to be complete. Thin, silent glazes of undisturbed northern lakes reflect the heavens like hand mirrors for the gods. Forest streams glide through dense Appalachian undergrowth. Plunging cascades in Venezuelan rain-forest waterfalls fill the atmosphere with mist, drowning the humid air with thundering silence. Fog banks arriving from the sea barely clear Irish coastal cliffs, then move inland to roll over hills and valleys like phantoms. Rains fall in a soothing drone and transform Tuscan cities of stone into watercolored mirages of pastel wetness. In Japan, water sweats up from thermal volcanic arteries collecting in steaming baths inches away from crystalline mounds of snow and ice. Even though chemistry and physics dictate the action of water everywhere in the world, the vast range of qualities that water is shaped into by the environment sets the state for profound interpretation and inspiration for architects.