When a tourist, I love an early morning brisk walk on a business district street as the city is just waking up. The busy people around you are tele-guided to their known destinations, detached from the space you occupy, that of an observer, an outsider looking in at the bustling life of a different universe.
As I watch San Francisco’s Market Street coming alive at dawn, amid it all I stumble onto a beautiful fountain. This street is a gem, with its green pockets in between the highrise, they are carefully inserted mini-microcosms.
The fountain has multiple glass rings surrounded by large rocks and sits on a paved piazza with a matching floor pattern. Rock and glass shape the water and the three together build a beautiful urban sculpture.
Water is pushed up to the top where a thin brass plate ads a sparkle. There it bubbles softly before pressing moving patterns into the glass as it slides off back into the ground.
And then the cycle repeats…a water garden as alive as the people around it.