The fountain
1 Water enters fountain at highest point, pumped at 100 litres/second.
2 Water travelling east bounces down steps.
3 A specially sculpted channel makes the water rock gently.
4 Water picks up momentum and is invigorated by jets.
5 Water flowing westwards resembles a babbling brook.
6 Air bubbles are introduced as it approaches a waterfall before entering a water feature created by its flow over carved stone.
7 Final destination is the reflecting pool, where water from east and west meet before being pumped out to restart cycle.
The granite stone was quarried by Ennstone Breed Ltd at South Penquite Farm, Blisland, Bodmin, Cornwall, PL30 4LH. The 520 tonnes was quarried from the Delanke quarry and shipped to Northern Ireland were it was milled to the McConnells cut the fountain design from DeLanke Cornish Granite into 550 stone sections of detailed carving to complete the 120m oval course of the fountain or ‘necklace of water’. Highly sophisticated carving of 520 tonnes of raw Cornish granite to a tolerance of 2mm produced the plethora of patterns which give the fountain its energetic water course, representing the Princess’s life, which comes to rest in a calm section before redistribution.
S McConnell & Sons completed the contract in 32 weeks. They had to buy in new cutting machines’ at a cost of over £40,000. The form of the stone was cut to mimic natural patterns such as ripples of the sand on a beach as well as other patterns. The stone was finished with a textured finish in the workshop, but extra anti slip channels were cut into the stone to help with the people walking in the fountain but as stated in the The Guardian article on the 12th October 2004 by Stuart Jefferies the fountain was not designed to be walked in.
The algae problem was looked into by a representative of Arup stated that there was no reason to think that the borehole which supplied the water for the fountain would cause excessive algae growth in the stone channels. But it is stated that algae shouldn’t settle at a rate of flow of 100l per minute, but like a mountain stream a build up over time will occur naturally. The solution for this problem is to have a weekly maintenance program.
The original contractors were replaced by Whitehorse Contractors Ltd who Sub – Contracted out the laying of 840 metres squared of Addastone TP stone with an aluminium restraining edge, this project was completed in a month.
We have enjoyed a good relationship with the Royal Parks over the last three years and have been pleased to assist with the regular maintenance, which is carried out annually. We carried out some routine maintenance works to the expansion joints and inspection covers in the resin bound pathway in November of 2007. We were also asked to install further land drainage to the inside of the fountain in preparation for a further section of porous resin bound pathway. This work was carried out as planned works and was completed within the programmed period.
Unfortunately, we had employed a Mr Munro as a site agent for a contract at the Bath Spa University, where he had supervised the contract satisfactorily. We then expanded his role to that of Trainee Contracts Manager for our Civil Engineering division. This brought the Diana Memorial into his remit for the drainage works.
Our MD Mike Sugg planned the operation and attended site with Mr Munro to ensure that the work was proceeding to plan. Whilst on site he inspected the excavation for the drainage and the exposed side of the fountain. He noted some small leaks along the fountain, but the condition of the foundations and the fountain generally was the same as it had been three years earlier when he had installed the porous pathway.
Imagine our surprise at the newspaper article, which stated that "the fountain was losing thousands of litres of water per hour and was subsiding and would need to be taken up and re-installed" and that "Mr Munro’s company CCE Ltd had been called into inspect the fountain"!
We would like to "set the record straight". Mr Munro had left our company, without explanation, before the comments appeared in the press. He was never a principal of the company and was not qualified to make judgement about any structure nor was he a spokesman for the company. His comments were made without our knowledge and are certainly not representative of the views of this company.
We consider the fountain to be a great success. It is a tranquil place in a hectic city. The number of visitors is a testament to its popularity. Unfortunately, everything about Lady Diana is covered in controversy by the press, and the fountain is just a small part of that controversy. We have been proud of our association with the Memorial Fountain, the architects Gustaffson Porter who designed the fountain and the custodians of the fountain, the Royal Parks.
http://www.cirencestercivilengineering.co.uk/news07.html
White Horse Contractors were delighted to be involved in this auspicious contract. The overwhelming popularity of the feature in itself led to the problems that the company was employed to remediate. The works required the replacement of the entire upper soil profiles surrounding the feature. A complex network of drainage was installed, over which a specially manufactured rootzone layer was laid and finally, the finished surface was turfed with a synthetically reinforced natural turfsystem.
Combined with a fully automated irrigation system, the specification for the grass surrounds is similar to that which may be found on a premiership football pitch.
The construction profile has been designed to assist the turf culture, thereby combining the qualities of a structurally sound surface for pedestrians, as well as the ability to grow quality grass.
The site is now equipped to withstand the rigours of both the best and worst of English weather. A revolutionary footpath system, designed by Gustafson Porter, was constructed, a resin bound, porous surface was laid over a fully permeable formation and inter connected to the drainage system. This non-slip surface will allow public access to the principle areas of the memorial fountain at all times, regardless of prevailing conditions.
http://www.whitehorsecontractors.co.uk/html/case-studies/diana memo
The original trees were removed as well and 3 new saplings where their replacements.
The pump in the fountain blocked after the opening due to a heavy summer storm which blocked the pump inlet and damaged the pump coursing the fountain to over flow and flood an area 15 m wide and 300mm deep. The water feature / fountain was used as a dog bath, and had dirty nappies dumped into it, as well as a pedalling pool
The Guardian 12th October 2004
'My job was to understand the essence of her' ... Gustafson unveiling the fountain. Photo: David Sillitoe
Kathryn Gustafson shows me a delightful drawing. It depicts two people kneeling before a rapidly flowing stream, one of them running their fingers moodily through the water. It is a scene of contemplation and calm.
This was one of the drawings that the American landscape artist submitted to support her winning entry to build the memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales, in Hyde Park. It bears little relation to reality. The day after Gustafson's fountain was opened by the Queen in July, high winds brought down a deluge of leaves, blocking grilles in the memorial's pool and causing a flood on the grass 15m wide and 30cm deep. It looked awful. Soon after, dog owners let their pets pollute the 210m oval water concourse. Humans too paddled in the streams during the hot weather, and some people dumped used nappies in the water courses that had been lovingly hewn out of De Lank granite from Bodmin Moor.
Gustafson had tempted fate at the memorial's inauguration. She said: "I've never seen a job go as smoothly as this. I sometimes wondered if we had a guardian angel. The best bit will be when the public likes it."
If the public did like it, their actions said otherwise. And then things got worse; several visitors injured themselves as they slipped over on the granite. At the same time, Gustafson's ring of bright water faced a tsunami of press criticism. Even sympathetic writers compared it to a giant Scalextric track or a Disney-like splash ride for children. The more vicious ones called it a puddle, a moat without a castle, part of a conspiracy to forget the woman it was supposed to be memorialising.
Then the water stopped flowing. A 2m metal fence was put up to keep the public out while engineers investigated the problem. The fence is still there. For some the whole thing seemed a clunking metaphor for Diana - the cycle of her life had gone up, down, round and up again really fast, and then unexpectedly, erm, stopped.
It was an embarrassing debacle for an internationally renowned, award-winning landscape artist, and Gustafson, who has offices in London and Seattle, disappeared from British public view for a while. The brouhaha, she says now, gave her an irksome insight into what it must have been like to be the subject of her most controversial work. "I'm sure glad I'm not her," she says. "Just that little window into that level of scrutiny was enough for me."
For her first face-to-face interview since the debacle, Gustafson says she would prefer not to meet me at the Diana memorial, but rather at her offices in Kentish Town in London. There she concedes that she failed to predict how many people would visit the memorial, not to mention what unappealing things they would do when they get there.
"When it first opened, 5,000 people an hour came to see it," she says. A flicker of remembered dread passes across her otherwise serene face. "How could you anticipate that? How can you solve a problem like that quickly? If it was a question of a stadium with 70,000 seats that would be all right, but there was no precedent. The turf around the oval couldn't survive those kind of numbers. The level of management has had to be increased because of the level of people. We really underestimated that. I thought we had a guardian angel over the project; I really wish she'd come back."
But surely there was more to the problem. Didn't she feel revolted by how some of the memorial's visitors behaved? "There's something that happens in sheer numbers. Individuals lose their self-consciousness," she says diplomatically. "When one person does something, others follow. A friend of mine told me that with economic housing, if some kids throw a rock through a window, then you should repair it fast otherwise you'll have three windows broken. If you repair that first window quickly, it says it's not acceptable to do that and it stops that copycat behaviour. It is the same with the memorial." How? "Putting a fence up to protect it. Though I do hope as things calm down that one day that fence will go away." She is not sure when that will be feasible."We just need time to solve the problems."
Gustafson is appealingly contrite about some of the errors she and her partners made with the memorial. "I feel we made a mistake letting people walk in the water. I apologise for that," she says. But you didn't envisage that they would go paddling or dog washing? "No. I thought people would picnic near the memorial, walk by and run their hands through the water, think about their lives, think about Diana." There are now signs around the memorial telling visitors not to walk in the water - though they will become relevant only when the fence comes down.
Gustafson has had problems with the British public before. Her rhododendron dell, part of a planting project in Crystal Palace in south London, has been mangled by people stealing plants. "We even wired them to the ground, but they still dug them up." That project, too, had a water feature designed by Gustafson that has never worked properly. That said, what remains of the planting is very beautiful indeed.
She argues that, amid all the fuss, the true nature of her project has gone unrecognised. "Let's talk about water quality," she says, "because that has been totally overlooked." Approximately 100 litres per second of extremely pure water, she points out, is pumped uphill from a storage tank beside the Serpentine. As it is pumped, the water races over granite whose surface has been textured to oxygenate it and remove nitrates. That oxygenated water eventually winds up in the nearby Serpentine, helping to cure the boating lake's algae bloom problem.
Part of the aim, she points out, was to cure not just the Serpentine, but also the site where the memorial is built, a piece of flooded land where trees often died by standing in polluted water. It is an environmentally healing fountain, then, or at least was meant to be.
The granite knobbles that texture the water were created by computer-operated drills working from software that mapped how rushing, dappling, leaping water would look. Gustafson started with clay models, which were digitally mapped at Ford's research and development department in the US. "Everybody seems to have ignored the good news about this incredible British work on this project." The granite was cut in Northern Ireland, for instance, "Everybody who worked on it did a fantastic job. I called the team the A-team, they were so good."
But then the pump broke, and British pride in its native talents was restored to normal levels. "So the pump broke. It's not headline news," says Gustafson. Actually, it was; but her point is that it shouldn't have been. "So some people fell over. People fall in streams all over the world. I'm not saying these problems and people's injuries aren't important."
What drew her to competing to build the memorial in the first place? "Hyde Park is what lured me," she says surprisingly. "It's just gorgeous and also I had this concern for the park." Intriguingly, she suggests that her conception for the memorial, which has been taken as being a female riposte to high-rise phallic memorials such as the Albert Memorial nearby, was more a response to the park. "Hyde Park is one of the most important parks in the world and I thought it would be wholly inappropriate to impede or penetrate those views that go down from the site over the Serpentine."
As for Diana, Gustafson confesses she knew little about her until she died. "I have lived and worked in France for 30 years, so British royal news was hardly important. But I remember the day she died. I was in my studio in the US working with a horticultural expert from Wales. He was this irreverent guy. Then the morning she died he called his wife and she told him the news. He just went grey. And I thought whoa! this is the last person I would have thought would have been concerned about Diana's death. And it made me think: What kind of power is that?"
Gustafson's design was selected after a vote by trustees of the Diana Memorial Fund over a reportedly more avant-garde proposal by British artist Anish Kapoor. "My job was to understand the essence of her and why she was loved, so that when you go to that memorial you feel the essence," says Gustafson. "I read a lot but what impressed me was that like all of us she had positive and destructive things happening to her. But what are little bumps for us were, because of the spotlight, experienced like compressed pressure for her. What impressed me is that she stayed whole throughout it all. Her secret garden, her inner self, her basic integrity stayed with her. That's why it's an oval. It's also contemporary, feminine, and flowing. Like her."
Perhaps the Diana Memorial will experience the same evolution as Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, which initially faced a lot of hostile criticism, but is now very popular. "I hope it will be like that," says Gustafson. She says that she was very aware of how the London Eye became a hit with the London public and it's hard not to imagine she's a little envious. It will take time for people to love her £3.5m memorial to Diana - if they ever do.
Born 1951, Gustafson started professional life as a fashion designer who retrained in France as a landscape designer. "After I did that, my father, who was a surgeon but obsessed with gardening, was so pleased. He felt as though he could talk to me for the first time," she says. Gustafson has designed everything from elegant electricity pylons to a Garden of Forgiveness in Beirut. Next month, her garden at the Treasury in Whitehall will open.
Typical is the recently opened Westergasfabriek park in Amsterdam, a site poisoned by toxic gas holders but now a 15 hectare park with reed beds, flowing water and environmentally friendly paths not only for cyclists but also frogs. It's been a wholly lovely experience, she says. "I loved working on it."
Has she enjoyed working on the Diana memorial? "Yes. It's a fantastic thing to have done. It's the first time I've tried to represent a person. And what a person!" She pauses and then smiles. "But I'm not sure I'll do this kind of thing again."
My conclusion for this part of the project is this
The designer used materials which if installed properly would last the test of time as intended. As for the walking in the feature I think this was an oversight but as she states it was never intended for this and more quiet contemplation. The underestimating of the popularity of the memorial where around 5,000 people per hour came to visit the fountain, which like the M25 is inexcusable as well as the poor choice of pathway around the perimeter. The pump a freak of nature or poor for thorough, my thorough is poor planning the grill should have stopped the leaves. The granite I still think is a good choice and only will get better with age. It seems to me that the overall success or failure of the scheme comes down to how competent the contractors installing the feature were! There were a few problems with the pump but this has been solved. The other facture with the failure of this project is how the public have decided to use the space.
