Lifestyle
Behind a Fashion Week Landmark
Mark Fuller is like P.T. Barnum. Just add water. Fuller, cofounder of the Los Angeles-based “liquid architecture” firm Water Entertainment Technology—or WET—is probably the world’s most renowned fountain designer. He has illuminated water with fire, made it dance to Frank Sinatra tunes, and sculpted it into monoliths lit from within.
Like Barnum, Fuller creates magical public spectacles that run the gamut from the classical splash at Lincoln Center’s new Revson fountain in New York City, to the wildly dramatic nine-acre long musical fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. His fans range from Hollywood machers to gobsmacked gamblers. Steven Spielberg called Fuller’s Bellagio fountain “the greatest single piece of public entertainment on planet earth.”
Seventy percent of WET projects are public works, not only because of the scale and cost, but also because Fuller believes in the potential of public spaces.
“I want to create people magnets that draw people into the projects,” he said over lunch at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Where in the world are people creating multi-million dollar entertainment projects that are totally free to the public? The only thing I could think of was the early days of broadcast television.”
Mark Fuller
His fascination with public entertainment dates back to his childhood in Salt Lake City and his first trip to Disneyland, which inspired him to build a “jungle cruise” in his backyard. After earning a degree in civil engineering at the University of Utah and studying an obscure physical phenomenon called the laminar stream at Stanford, Fuller went on to develop something called the laminar-flow nozzle. The nozzle, which enables Fuller to create arcs of water that appear motionless, has become instrumental in his fountains. He took the technique to Disney, where he got a job as an “imagineer,” and made a name for himself with the leapfrog fountains at EPCOT.
“There has always been this fascination to get water to do things in display,” he says. So successful were his projects at Disney that in 1983 Fuller and two colleagues decided to break out on their own and start WET. They created institutional designs for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, shopping centers from Hong Kong to Madrid, and the interior fountain at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center. But WET’s big break came in 1995 when Steve Wynn called them about doing something at the Bellagio. He’d heard about WET from the landscape architect, Don Brinkerhoff. Fuller and his partners met Wynn at the Santa Monica airport and flew out to Treasure Island for dinner. “Wynn said to me, ‘we’re going to put you on the map’ and I thought, oh yeah?”
The assignment was to create something bigger than they’d ever done, set to music. Fuller and his partners worked for three years on what would become the Bellagio. They set up mock fountains on the old site of the Dunes Hotel golf course to make sure their jets would be high enough. The “shooters”–or jets–fired shots 500 feet in the air. “We wanted people to forget they were in Vegas.”
Bellagio, Las Vegas
City Center Las Vegas
Fuller’s signature has become an almost surreal mix of art, physics and engineering. The Revson fountain at Lincoln Center, for example, has 317 computerized jets. When the fountain is at it’s fullest it contains 475 gallons of water and rises twelve feet. At night, 272 LED lights around the ring of the fountain transform it into a glowing white column. But a passerby can’t see any of this extraordinary technology and choreography, they only see a luminous column of water.
More recently, Fuller has completed the fountains at CityCenter in Las Vegas and will open a project in Korea in the spring. He also designed the first floating fountain in a reclaimed marshland in Mexico. Some of his fountains, like the Burj al Arab Hotel fountain in Dubai, combine fire with water. Others are more than a mile long, like the Crown Casino fountain in Melbourne, Australia.
Burj Dubai
Today Fuller works along with 210 employees—including textile designers, model builders, optical engineers, and chemists—on the WET campus in Sun Valley, California. With twelve buildings the campus looks more like a movie studio than an architecture firm. All the fountains are constructed entirely on site, but Fuller fears they may have to move some operations because they can’t shoot their highest jets on the site. They might interrupt flight patterns at the Burbank airport.
