Water as a liquid has no shape. It acquires definition from its surroundings, providing boundaries and edges to our landscapes while also connecting them.

How water is shaped, naturally or artificially, can distinguish it between a weapon-like tool (think of an industrial water jet cutter that can precisely slice through stone, leather, tile and steel) and a trusty, quiet, stationary park fountain (think of the ball fields where the push of a pudgy little thumb releases a soft, luscious pulse of cold water into a play-worn, parched mouth).

“Fountain designers and hydraulic experts often push the limits of water’s physical properties. When creating fountains, designers consider how the water should move — with gentle insistence or raging force; how the water should sound — as a soothing trickle or as a surging splash; and how the water should look — clear and smooth or frothy and white.” — Symmes, Marilyn F, and Kenneth A. Breisch. Fountains Splash and Spectacle: Water and Design from the Renaissance to the Present

While it is easy to see how water can be shaped when it is used ornamentally or as a recreational or industrial tool, it is less easy to imagine the intricate subterranean design of pipes and valves that allow (some of) us to live pretty much where we please, confident that with a turn of a knob or a press of a button, we can summons potable water. Equally as hidden is the drainage of our on-demand water. We may briefly watch it swirl downward but then it slips into little holes and then, into darkness.

There are people who “daylight” these subterranean hydraulic mysteries — at least a few layers of them. Meet Emmanuel Thingue, drinking fountain designer and Larry Snyder, drinking fountain fabricator.

Emmanuel Thingue, Senior Landscape Architect with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, has thought more about drinking fountains than he ever imagined he could and, he admits, more than he’d like to. In the early 1990s, during the salad days of his civic career, Emmanuel unwittingly became the designer of what is now the most ubiquitous style of drinking fountain in New York City’s parks — an uninterrupted cast iron number that he originally designed for an upgrade of Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza.

As any good landscape architect would, Emmanuel’s research and early sketches of new site furnishings for Cadman Plaza were informed not only by the Plaza’s 1939 inaugural architectural tone and materials vocabulary, but also by its vandals, prostitutes and maintenance crew’s service registers from the 1970s and 80s.

“During our design research,” Emmanuel says, “we found that most city park drinking fountains were vandalized in one specific way — by knocking out the bubbler. That was the single, chronic, most destructive form of vandalism because once the bubbler is gone the entire piece of furniture housing the waterworks is completely useless.” And so out of the gate, New York City Parks was charged with creating a drinking fountain design that was indestructible, functional and elegant.

Protecting the bubbler became a preeminent design concern.