For decades now, we haven’t been able to come to a collective agreement about what to call watershapes in which water flows over a lowered portion of the bond beam and is then caught in a trough of some sort before recirculation.

From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, we heard negative edge and infinity edge and horizon pool and infinity pool and spillover pool and vanishing edge and probably other terms I can’t remember.

At some point in there, Jim McCloskey – now publisher of WaterShapes but then editor of Pool & Spa News – decided arbitrarily (yet justifiably) that enough was enough, that the term vanishing edge was the most suggestive and appealing of the available choices and that, henceforward, vanishing edge would be the only term his magazines would use.

And that was so even if someone being interviewed or writing an article or column for him actually used or preferred a different term. A bit autocratic, perhaps, but it was a gesture to clarity and consistency I’ve always appreciated.

For all Jim’s efforts, however, the other terms have hung around through thick and thin, which leads me to wonder what’s up and why we as an industry seem to insist on using multiple terms to describe a single and by now well-established design detail.

Personally, I never liked negative edge as a term, because it implies that there is no edge even though we know there’s one there. I also object to infinity edge and infinity pool: Although they are somewhat poetic and maybe even a bit romantic, they are just too limited.

While they might be appropriate when the view beyond the edge truly approaches infinity in the form of a lofty water-on-water application, as we all should know by now these details also work in countless other settings and with views that cannot even remotely be described as “infinite.”

Horizon pool has the same limitation as a descriptive term, and while spillover pool is certainly accurate and descriptive, it’s just too dull for use in describing an effect that can be so dramatic.

So for me, vanishing edge is the winner, and I would define it as follows:

Vanishing Edge — a design detail in which one or more sides of a watershape appear to be missing, and the water flows over that edge and moves out of sight.

I welcome your suggestions and comments with respect to this definition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Coming to Terms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.