NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

IT IS ASSUMED to be unnecessary to dwell more than momentarily on the two absolute essentials in provision of drinking water in park areas. Primary of these most important considerations is the unalterable requirement that the water supply shall be completely safeguarded against contamination. Hardly second to this is the need for dispensing it at so many points over the park area that it is always easier for the park patron to avail himself of the protected water supply than to seek out brooks and other possible sources of drinking water not policed against pollution. Treatment of the bubbler, well, or spring as an architectural or landscape feature can hardly claim consideration until these two major demands have been met. Only a firm conviction that a safeguarded and widely distributed water supply may be taken for granted universally in the park planning thought of today encourages a venture in consideration of the form and character, in an architectural and landscape sense, of the dispensing media.

The cleaning out of a spring and the erection of some suitable enclosure to minimize the danger of pollution are in the direction of a safe water supply. However, if the public is to have free access to the spring at the source, the human equation enters and renders problematical continuing cleanliness. Poetic in fancy is the cool, clear pool from which to drink on bended knee, but subject in fact to the careless habits of that considerable section of the public which can be perfectly unaware that others both precede and follow.

The ungarnished rendering of a facility for the dispensing of drinking water is a vertical pipe terminating with a tap, the tap perhaps inverted to serve as a simple, but far from sanitary, "bubbler." Such a contrivance set out in the open will satisfy thirst, but certainly not the eye. If it is decided to mask its gaunt utilitarianism by locating it amongst low growth of planting, it is not readily discoverable, and a sign must point out its location. If provision is not made for disposing of drip and overflow, the tap is soon the center of a muddy wallow, and only accessible if planks or stepping stones are provided. All of which soon demonstrates that the utterly simple facility suffers from very real disadvantages, and leads logically and necessarily to its being accepted as something of a feature, its functionalism neither so starkly naked as to offend the eye nor so elaborately draped as to fail to declare itself. With the imperative need for suitable disposal of waste water and for bubbler of truly sanitary type, and such desirable refinements as steps to accommodate children, tap for the filling of pails, and in some climates or locations even roof protection against the heat of the sun, the feature becomes multi-functional, and demands careful study in any pursuit of satisfying results.

Important in connection with a piped water supply out-of-doors is a suitable arrangement for shutting off and draining the pipes in winter weather. This provision should not be overlooked wherever climate would indicate need for it.

Because the treatment of the drinking fountain or bubbler as an isolated unit is so difficult, every opportunity should be embraced to incorporate this facility within any suitable building situated near the spot where drinking water is a requirement. It is possible and desirable to include bubblers as features of structures erected primarily for other purposes, and thus to eliminate some of the separate installations. Many bubblers have been installed separately that need not have been.

Sometimes the source of drinking water at a park location is a shallow well equipped with a hand-operated pump. This piece of mechanism, as currently quantity-produced, has strayed far from the picturesqueness of its forerunner, the town pump, though very definitely not into the arms of any industrial designer. It displays nothing of good old-fashioned primitive substance and has strangely escaped the face-lifting manipulations of the streamliners. It is not to be wondered at then that the plight of this neglected ugly duckling so challenges the chivalry of designers of park facilities that they ride forth in shining armor to see justice done.

Rescue may take the form of a round or squared log hollowed out to sheathe or encase as much as possible of the unprepossessing mechanism. Often the handle that is standard equipment with the pump is replaced by one shaped out of wood, and the spout on occasion is hooded by a fortuitously occurring forking branch. This is not to be tolerated of course if it must be interpreted as a reprehensible device for making a new-fangled metal pump look as though it were a primitive wooden one. Justification lies rather in the fact that something unsightly may be masked by the use of a material more natural to a park setting, just as the hood, covering and concealing the automobile engine, is accepted without any very general eyebrow-lifting.

Of course there are those who are for open plumbing openly arrived at and who will decry the foregoing solution as being utterly unprincipled. It is our great good fortune that for them there remains an alternative method for bringing a measure of charm to the creaking, clanging pump without resorting to the immoral trickery of the aforementioned handcrafted figleaf. This is to cloister the unadorned pump in the dark shadows of a small shelter.

The well or pump shelter can be so happily executed that we are made blind to the ugliness of the pump in our admiration for the shelter. The effective disposal of the waste water from a pump located in a shelter is an important detail. This is sometimes provided for by a sump at the base of the pump, but the more positive method for preventing damp and unpleasant conditions within the shelter is to lead the waste outside the building by means of a trough where it can leach into a dry well. Seats of one form or another are usually incorporated with the pump shelter.

Another structural item often required in a park as a part of the water supply system, though probably seldom for drinking purposes, is an elevated storage tank. The "theory of approach" to design of this structure presents much the same quandary as that of observation and fire towers. There is at once an urge to give it skeletonized directness revealing of purpose and an inclination to enclose it in a degree concealing of its function. When the former approach can be followed to the high accomplishment of the example at Mount Nebo State Park, Arkansas, we are convinced that this is the one admissible "theory" of design. When some of the examples that enclose and conceal the tank are studied, we waver to the point of admitting that the second approach has its points.

Accessory to an elevated storage tank is a minor building housing the electric or gasoline operated mechanism that lifts the water from the well, spring, or other source to the elevated tank. While it is possible to imagine unusual conditions under which the pump machinery might be in the base of the tower enclosing the elevated tank, it is customarily a small separate building, determined by the source of the water supply and hence more or less remote from the location logical for the storage tank. If the water is to be pumped from a well, a hatch should be provided in the roof of the pumphouse directly above the well to anticipate the pulling of the casing or making of other repairs without affecting fixed construction.

The problem becomes one of knowing how far to go and where to stop in glorification of the drinking fountain, the pump shelter, and other water supply structures. The examples shown herein illustrate various stages of the process. Personal preference alone will dictate at what point and in what particular the bounds of reason and good taste have been overreached.

• Plate I G—1 — Plate I G—24