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July 25, 2008, 01:37 PM ET
Guest Blogger: Reflections in a Campus Fountain
Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain (Photo by Alan Ward)
Last October the American Society of Landscape Architects gave Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain its coveted Landmark Award. The award, given jointly with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is noteworthy not only because it honors a design these venerable arbiters deemed transformative, but also because it honored a fountain—a campus fountain, no less.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about campus fountains. Actually, I think about campus fountains often. I walk past three on my own campus quite regularly, and I rarely fail to pause—or sometimes linger—and drink them in. I’ve been known to toss a coin and make a wish.
Marc Mayerson
How many campuses have fountains? Poorer is the college that does not. True, they are the banes of groundskeepers, plumbers, and moralists. Filters clog with leaves, pumps break and water stagnates, pranksters pour in bubble bath, and occasionally a sorority sister is found splashing drunk and naked. But the cost—in time, money, and perhaps a good girl’s reputation—pales beside the benefits: the sound, the spray, the movement, the lunchtime visitors like shorebirds at the water’s edge, the wavy reflection of a building at twilight, an unforgettable kiss, the broken-hearted test taker pondering an uncertain future, the diaphanous rainbow in a wispy mist.
When fountains succeed, they succeed spectacularly. Among those that come to mind are the University of Notre Dame’s Clarke Memorial Fountain; St. Louis University’s Clock Tower Fountain; Purdue University’s Loeb Fountain; the Littlefield Fountain at the University of Texas at Austin;
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