Mark Fuller has done for fountains what Walt Disney did for mice. He’s made them dance, sing, talk, wiggle and jump, among numerous other behaviors.

Fuller and his Los Angeles firm WET Design have created so many beautiful and interactive “water features” throughout Southern California—and around the world—that a person almost always knows at least one of his works.

The reaction is usually the same. “Oh, really, he did that? We love that fountain at” (fill in the blank): Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Los Angeles Music Center and California Plaza Watercourt, Gaslamp Quarter Park in San Diego, Fashion Island in Newport Beach, the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, and on and on. His international commissions range from Singapore to Madrid to Dubai.

The lack of water in Southern California has inspired many to treat it like a jewel, using it to accessorize buildings, courtyards, business centers and public parks. While designers, architects and landscape firms will often work with water, few work with it exclusively, as Fuller does. None are as famous.

With a master’s degree in engineering and product design from Stanford University, Fuller went to work for Disney’s famous Imagineering division before striking out on his own to start WET in his backyard in 1983. Now, as president and CEO he holds more than 50 patents, employs 100 designers, project managers and staff and has annual revenues upwards of $16 million. Current projects range from $50,000 to $40 million.

Fuller has converted water into arching and syncopating tubes, tennis ball-sized spheres, geysers topped by fireballs, and tsunami-like walls that diminish into gentle lapping waves. Adults stare transfixed, emitting the same oohs and aahs one hears at fireworks displays, while children shrieking with joy dart in and out of water jets that jump up and down, here and there, like playful prairie dogs.

His crowd-pleasing fountain on the plaza of the Los Angeles Music Center was one of the winners of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s Liquid Art competition for public artworks in the region involving water. Aqueduct talked with Fuller recently.

AQ: You’ve been described as water sculptor. What do you write on the income tax line for “occupation”?

MF: Because I travel a lot and fill out a lot of visa and passport applications, I simply put “designer,” because above all what we do here is design with water. The broader answer is that we create experiences that bring pleasure and happiness and some level of joy to the people who interact with them—at least that’s our objective.

AQ: It must be rewarding to see the reaction to your work.

MF: Yes, one of the things that gives us a great deal of satisfaction and fulfillment is when we complete an installation that succeeds at both the popular and artistic levels.

From the beginning, the Los Angeles Music Center fountain has been packed with people, from kids on weekend mornings to arts patrons in tuxedos and evening gowns at night. But it has also won a number of awards. We certainly don’t feel that success in those arenas is exclusionary; we don’t believe that, well, if you won a design award it has to be highbrow and people wouldn’t enjoy it, or if people love it it’s sort of common. I think you can succeed at both ends of the spectrum.

You know, if I could go back to it, you said you had seen me called a water sculptor. Actually, if I could distinguish, in our minds there is a significant difference between art, which could include sculpture, and design. Art is really created for its own sake, for the statement or a vision that the artist has in mind. But what we do, the word we use a lot is ‘contextual.’ Our design is solution-oriented. That doesn’t mean just practical solutions, that can mean a visual solution and solutions that entertain or do whatever they want.

But we are driven by the context of a project, so if you were to give us two projects in two parts of Los Angeles, or maybe across the street from each other, after we immersed ourselves to find out everything we could about the sites we would arrive at two very very different designs. This puts us far away from the other folks, good folks, who are in the so-called ‘fountain industry,’ who tend to have catalogs and you pick from them like you do groceries, and drop them in a cart. We are so much the other end of that, and I think that has really been our contribution to this water-feature industry, to drive that.

AQ: It used to be that only drunks got into fountains, though it always had a fun connotation, like Scott and Zelda in the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York. But you made it acceptable for—you encouraged—sober people to play in fountains.

MF: Well, we did. I think we pretty much pioneered that. One of the tenets of our firm, really, and our design philosophy is to always question the reasons that things have traditionally been done. [For instance], why is there always a big pool between me and the fountain? And not only that, but a fence between me and the deep old pool? … Well, there must have been reasons, like when the wind blows the water splashes halfway across the pool, so you keep people further back, and there’s a fence because somebody could drown in the pool. So we ask questions like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we got more people soaked?” and “What if the pool was only three-eighths inches deep and nobody could drown in it?”

And then, once we started to do that, going back to the jumping fountains at Epcot, sometimes called the Leap Frog Fountain, my thinking there was, what if we take an eraser, as if it was a drawing, and blur the line. [Consequently] there is no people space and water space; it’s all together. And then you end up with a water element that has a whole different character to it.

People look at that fountain to this day and don’t really think of it as a fountain, they think of it as animated water, water with personality. They walk under it and they see water flying over their heads, which I still do from time to time, stand there and think, “This can’t be because it seems to be defying all laws,” but it all came from questioning, you know, the “why” behind the tradition.

AQ: Are there any ethical concerns you need to consider in your designs, like the lavish use of water in an arid region like Los Angeles or Las Vegas, that might lead people to think water is abundant when it’s really not?

MF: Yes. There are two areas that we are especially concerned with: one is the energy usage, the responsible use of energy, and the other one is the responsible use of the water itself. We work pretty hard at getting the maximum amount of use of the water while it’s in the display part of its cycle.

I think of Metropolitan Water District. I think of you guys every time I turn on the faucet at the sink. I think, on the upstream side of this there is so much technology, I mean hundreds of miles of pipes and filtration plants and everything, right? And on the downstream side there is so much technology, sewage treatment, reclamation, all this stuff, and there is just a one-second 12-inch-long experience between its coming from the tap and hitting the drain.

[At WET Design,] we try to make sure that the “experience moment” is as maximal as possible before it goes away, and of course we recycle. I don’t know if you’ve seen the fountain we did at Fashion Island, we did two of them, one of them is called Pop Jets—it shoots up little marbles of water into the air and there are about a dozen and a half of these little jets … and it shoots up about three feet high, and the kids love to run around and catch them or slap at them with their hands. But all the water in the air at that fountain at any given moment wouldn’t fill a coffee cup. The point is, you can treat that water as a jewel and get more entertainment and excitement out of it than if you had a big old tumbling waterfall there.

The other extreme is, sometimes we’re asked about the fountains at the Bellagio, and we didn’t make the decision whether or not that lake should be there, but I know that the Bellagio people will tell you that it’s on the site of the old Dunes golf course, which would lose a lot more water through evaporation, and of course all the water we use in those fountains is recycled.

AQ: Did you ever see Liberace perform in front of the famous “Waltzing Waters?” They’re both listed in a book, “The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.”

MF: You’ve sprinkled the seeds of some interesting things to comment about there, especially having to do with that bad taste thing. We had a real struggle here internally when we first decided to tackle a fountain that was synchronized or someway related to music, because I remember seeing those dancing waters things when I was a kid, and they were fun because they were something new and there was novelty to them and kind of pushing technology to something you hadn’t see before.

But there wasn’t anything I think anyone would seriously call an art form or any measure of expression of taste. And as the years progressed, we asked ourselves from time to time, could we do something we would be proud of that would be well-respected by the design community and not be a silly piece of technology wrapped in some kind of kitsch fluff. And it wasn’t until we had been in business a good number of years that we really got to that point, and of course I think the Fountains of Bellagio were the quintessence of that.

A lot of that had to do with sublimating the technology to the point that you are not aware of it. When you look at the Bellagio, you are immediately caught up in the emotions and the sort of rapture of the visual richness of what is going on. And you don’t see anything wigwagging and pop popping around, like you’d be aware of valves opening and closing.

If somebody says, Wow, I really like that WET fountain, it’s really novel, or has some really new technology in it, we’ve failed. There may be novelty to it, there may be new technology to it, but if it doesn’t stand there on its own as a design expression, an artistic expression beyond that, then we have failed.”

Music Center fountain
135 North Grand Avenue, Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Thomas Guide page 634, grid F3