Une fontaine magique

Il fait très chaud.
Après avoir vu les fleurs en verre au museum d'histoire naturelle de Harvard, nous passons devant une fontaine aux cailloux très tentante.
Les enfants sautent de rocher en rocher. Octave, trempé, finit par enlever ses habits et nous les mettons à sécher sur le fil qui protège les pelouses.

A propos de la fontaine : elle a été dessinée au début des années 80 par le paysagiste Peter Walker et a reçu un prix en 2008.

Voici un article (en anglais) :

Landscape Award Celebrates a 'Transformational' Fountain at Harvard

By Lawrence Biemiller

The Tanner Fountain (Photos by Alan Ward)

Once upon a time—and not so long ago as all that—if you planned on splashing water around in a decorative manner, you were expected to provide a basin in which the water could be collected afterward. In a long, rich history reaching back to the Rome of emperors and aqueducts, fountains had always had basins. The Trevi Fountain, in Rome; the Apollo Fountain, at Versailles; and the Buckingham Fountain, in Chicago—they all have basins.

But basins can leak, becoming maintenance headaches. In the early 1980s, Harvard University was contemplating a new fountain. Derek Bok, then the president, noted that a number of campus fountains had ended up as planters, and he wondered if the designer, Peter Walker, could come up with a solution. Mr. Walker did just that—by getting rid of the basin and simply grading the site so that the water ran toward the drains. It was a solution so obvious, and so good, that you have to wonder why no one had thought of it before. Plenty of people have thought of it since, of course—fountains everywhere now take advantage of Mr. Walker’s fountain-design advance.

Now the American Society of Landscape Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are honoring the Harvard fountain—the Tanner Fountain—with the 2008 Landmark Award. “The creation of a fountain without a basin was an innovation that transformed fountain design,” the award jury notes. The fountain “was the first institutional project of the ‘Landscape as Art’ movement, and it continues to prove that landscape architecture is an art, and the landscape architect an artist.”

The fountain consists of 32 jets in the middle of a 60-foot-diameter circle in which 159 granite boulders are arranged. It was designed to be inhabited, the jury says. “Grass, asphalt, and concrete paths infiltrate the geometric form, inviting human participation,” the jury notes, and the fountain “is heavily used in all seasons.” In warm months, the jets produce a mist that creates rainbows; in winter, snow makes the fountain a striking still life.

The jury notes that the fountain was “transformational” and adds, simply enough: “It lives in your memory.”