PROPELLED TOWNSCAPER SKIN
PROPELLED TOWNSCAPER PORTABLE

The kiosks designed by Adam Architecture, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Eric Parry, Hopkins Architects, Studio Weave and Zaha Hadid Architects are, with one exception, rather more than simple drinking fountains. There is both charm and an implicit civic critique in the design submissions for the Kiosk competition prompted by the AJ and its partner Turkishceramics.

Corporations own and profit from water issuing from taps, spigots and drinking fountains but, in terms of its own substance and fluid properties, the water flows freely and we drink it freely as its fountainhead bobbles upwards from chunky little spouts.

PROPELLED TOWNSCAPER PORTABLE

Packaged drinking water becomes a Natural™ experience, a portable convenience rather than a basic connection with nature’s visible, and invisible, watercourses.

PROPELLED TOWNSCAPER SKIN

That’s not possible with a nipple-tipped bottle of Highland McSpritz, whose polyethylene terephthalate skin crackles like burning twigs in our collaterally branded grip. One typically has to bow slightly to drink from a water fountain, and in those few seconds we take the form of supplicants to the most important life-substance in our physical world whether we’re bond dealers, homeless, job-pulped commuters, or lividly bulked-up xenophobes, we experience, in a modest one-to-one manner, a simple communion with nature. Even if we don’t feel humble as we lean forward, we will surely feel humble as we drink. When we drink from a public water fountain, it’s a humble act. It’s tempting to consign drinking fountains to the category of urban bric-a-brac so loved by that ardent 1960s townscaper and editor of the Architectural Review, Hubert de Cronin Hastings.īut is there, to rework the title of Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel, a god in these small things? Can the gulp factor become as important as the wow factor among planners, architects, and developers hunched over their World Class Mixed-Use Regeneration Design Kits? The momentarily pleasant act of quenching thirst at a fountain might also seem insignificant. I mean the unremarkable kind that are little more than a partially enclosed standpipe surmounted by a small metal bowl and a cobra-headed nozzle, from which water spurts in small, softly lucent arcs. Imagine a simple public drinking fountain.

Propelled townscaper