Canadian engineer Dan Euser Waterarchitecture Inc. acts as a fountain design consultant for Michael Arad, who designed the 9/11 Memorial at the WTC in New York City. According to the latter's plan, water should continuously flow into the rectangular "voids" left by the destroyed twin towers. It should create a cohesive curtain that would not splash on visitors, not blown up by the wind, or clog up with fallen leaves in the fall.
To solve all these problems, Jezer built a real-scale model of the corner of the memorial in his backyard. The $ 175,000 12-meter structure consists of 300 sheets of plywood, timber framing, metal fittings and three pumps.
As the experimenter himself says, the "behavior" of water cannot be predicted on the basis of scaled-down models - every possible volume of water behaves differently under the same conditions.
Ezer must calculate the ideal water flow angle, head, speed and total fluid volume for these artificial waterfalls.
In the course of the work, it became clear that it would be impossible to create the thin water curtains that were proposed in the Arad project. A fountain like this would spray water on visitors and continually moisten the granite or concrete walls of the memorial, resulting in deterioration of even the most wear-resistant material.
It was decided to use separate weirs, that is, the water will be fed over the edge of the gutter with jagged edges. The stream they create resembles a curtain of crystal beads, which, in turn, can be interpreted as a continuous stream of tears.
Another problem that the giant layout should help solve is how the "voids" should be drawn at ground level. You can limit them to water bodies 1.5 m wide, or you can allow visitors to approach their very edge.
