Ever since emerging from the primordial soup (or, more metaphorically, being evicted from the world’s greatest pleasure garden), we humans have enjoyed a primal attraction to water—as the price of beach- and lakefront property in more recent times attests. Just being around a body of water has a preternaturally calming effect, which may explain why no memorial—from the Lincoln in Washington to the King Center in Atlanta—is complete without its own reflecting pool. The still surface reflects the scenery while inspiring our own mental reflections upon this mortal coil.
Placed by the house, a reflecting pond is unburdened by the swimming pool’s recreational imperatives (and steeper budget), and adds soul and depth to the landscape. Just as a mirror makes a room feel more open, water expands the vertical view, blurring the boundaries between sky and ground plane. And the benefits are not only visual. Whether at the Alhambra in Spain or in the hills of Hollywood, such oases offer evaporative cooling effects in hot, arid climates.
Although the pool may have had greater social cachet in the past, things may be shifting, as historian William van Leeuwen suggests: “If the pond became pool, now…the pool has reverted to the pond: ‘You don’t see many diving boards in pools these days,’ the New York Times informed its readers. ‘They want pools to pass for ponds.’” What follow are watering holes designed to be gazed at—rather than dived into—by seven practitioners past and present.
Project: VDL Research House II (1966)
Architect: Richard Neutra
Location: Los Angeles, California
Named in homage to Neutra’s patron, Cornelius Van der Leeuw, the VDL Research House was built in 1932 (using mostly donated “test” materials) and destroyed by fire 30 years later. By this time the Silver Lake Reservoir—whose proximity had once lent a cooling effect—had been downsized, and was 600 feet away. So Neutra (shown here) and his son, Dion, integrated water into the house’s redesign, most spectacularly with the shallow rooftop reflecting pool adjacent to the solarium. Looking out toward the lake, the two bodies of water appear to merge, and the fluid feeling is echoed inside the penthouse, where glass and mirrored walls expand and reflect the views.
Project: Case Study House #21 (1966)
Architect: Pierre Koenig
Location: Los Angeles, California
Case Study House #21 is that Los Angeles anomaly: an air-conditioning-free zone. Koenig, with sensitivity to the site and concern for sustainable solutions, surrounded the house with five shallow reflecting pools to create a cooling microclimate. In the hottest months, water is pumped up to the roof and then falls back through downspouts for even greater tempering of the air. Writes Esther McCoy in Case Study Houses 1945–1962: “The house…introduces a new concept in making water an integral structure and landscape element. Brick terraces, spanning the pools, lead to the living areas, and the terraces add another plane and texture to the interplay between water and structure.”
Project: Casa Galvez (1954)
Architect: Luis Barragán
Location: San Angel, Mexico
Upon accepting the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1980, Barragán commented: “Waking and sleeping, the sweet memory of the fountains of my childhood has always been with me: the spillways, the cisterns on the haciendas, the wellheads in the courtyards of the convents, the watering troughs, the little reflecting ponds, and the old aqueducts…and my work feeds on the idea of transposing these distant, nostalgic longings to the contemporary world.” At the house he designed for Antonio Galvez in a colonial neighborhood of Mexico City, large windows in the living room look onto the reflecting pool and the surrounding rose-pink walls, creating a private meditation.
Project: Killingsworth Residence (1961)
Architect: Edward Killingsworth
Location: Long Beach, California
The rectangular pool in the courtyard of the home Killingsworth designed for his family is a 60-foot-long canvas for a massive canopy of wisteria, whose overhanging vines and flowers transform the water into a kind of modernist Monet. Killingsworth had
an affinity for such pools: One is required to walk over water via raised stepping-stones to reach the front doors of the Frank House (Case Study House #25), the Case Study “Triad” House A in San Diego, and even his Long Beach office.
Project: 949 Toro Canyon Road (1999)
Architect: Barton Myers
Location: Montecito, California
When architect Barton Myers decided to build a home at the crest of a secluded mountain canyon, his primary concern was wildfires. So he placed four pavilions on three stepped terraces, and integrated fire protection into the architecture by putting water on the roofs. “Obviously, they’re not going to burn, and they provide insulation. They’re beautiful as reflecting ponds, but they also serve as water reservoirs,” Myers explains in his book, 3 Steel Houses. Water cascades lyrically down the procession of rooftops, from the studio to the residence to the guesthouse below, which also supports a lap pool. The only dry building is the garage, which plays host to a Zen garden.
Project: Rios Garden (2000)
Architect: Mark Rios
Location: Bel-Air, California
"Water is an important way to enter a house or a garden," says architect Mark Rios. "It's mentally cleansing and provides a calming transition from the outside world." This ’50s-era property was bone dry until Rios turned it into his living laboratory. A walkway to the front door leads over a 15-foot-long and three-foot-wide water channel, which expands into a five-by-eight-foot backyard pond populated with plants—a low window in the wall between front and back offers a framed preview of the water lilies and irises. And there are sound effects. “I added a bubbler,” says Rios, “which creates a nice soft Moorish sound and ripples that barely break the surface. Anything more is too heroic!”
Project: Tubac House (2000)
Architect: Rick Joy
Location: Tubac, Arizona
In the void created between a glass-and-rusted-steel house and guesthouse, a courtyard offers shade and refuge from the wilder landscape beyond. Among the raised and ground-level planting beds are cubic pools that reflect the clawing limbs of mesquite by day and summer lightning storms at night. Within this partially paved desert microcosm nature is contained, but not castrated: “Through the garden of barrel cactuses that appear to be standing guard, one descends into a courtyard by way of a stair wedged between the two retaining walls. From here, an oasis unfolds: cool dark shaded area, the sound of water trickling, humming birds, the smell of sage and flowers, reflections” (from Rick Joy: Desert Works).
