Okay, hear me out.
If you have enormous amounts of money, the right thing to do with it
is to help other people and the world.
Obviously.
But very rich people will likely spend some money showing off,
and I can’t help feeling that if that is going to happen,
then it might be nice if things like this
came back into fashion.
In English, the word "water feature" seems almost quaint.
It implies a small fountain in a back yard
or a little stream running down to a pond,
some little babbling-brook diversion to break up a suburban garden.
But the German translation for that is "wasserspiele":
literally, "water-games".
And if you were very rich German nobility 300 years ago,
water-games might include a massive hillside park,
a seven-tonne, eleven-metre-high statue of Hercules,
and a fountain that reaches fifty metres high.
This is the Water Games of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe in Germany,
it's now a World Heritage Site.
The fountains and water features here are powered by gravity,
and controlled on-demand by
hidden mechanisms in underground pipelines,
some of which are centuries old.
IN GERMAN:
By the time you see this video,
the Wasserspiele will be open to the public for the summer season.
But today, they are just testing.
A few lucky tourists were in the right place at the right time,
but the team here didn’t announce this was happening.
Except, they sort of did, because first,
there was big release of water at the top and the cascades that go half way down the hill.
And I really wasn’t expecting the noise.
[LOUD HONK]
[PITCH AND VOLUME CONTINUE RISING]
[horn fades] The rushing water brings a lot of air with it,
and that’s forced through the trumpets that the Herald statues hold.
The noise is immense, it’s a siren that for 300 years has told anyone in the park
that the water games are about to begin.
The water goes through a series of stations,
each a few minutes' walk apart,
and at each station the water is released manually,
at a certain time, one after the other.
After the cascades, there’s the artificial waterfalls,
and then the bridge, which leads to
the colossal aqueduct, wind and spray all blowing around
from the force of the water.
And the crowds of people who’ll be coming to watch this summer
will follow along, walking the path,
waiting for the water to be released
and for each show to begin.
So I assumed that this was basically
one big river with some engineering in the way.
But this was built in several parts, by several different landowners,
so of course, it's more complicated than that.
And it all ends here, at the fifty-metre fountain.
Now, I’m not saying that building things like this
should be a higher priority for rich people than
feeding or housing the world, or any other philanthropy.
Of course.
And okay, maybe not fountains,
maybe some other big physical art stuff.
But I can’t help feeling that if someone is going to spend huge amounts
on vanity projects to show off their wealth to the world…
why not make them spectacular, and fun, and built to last for centuries?