About the Exhibition

HALOA’s curatorial group project, called (In)visible: A Curatorial Representation of the Intimacies of Drinking Fountains aims to make visible an overlooked public infrastructure, the urban drinking fountain. These drinking fountains, throughout their short history, have demonstrated the complicated relationship between the city and an integral natural source for urban life, water. The first modern drinking fountains, installed in the 1800s in London, were built to respond to outbreaks of cholera within the city, spread by polluted water from the Thames. Since then, an elaborate system of water infrastructure, comprising aqueducts, reservoirs, pipelines, and filtration systems, have connected the water that flows out of mountains, lakes, and rivers, to cities.

In the current time, drinking water has evolved into not only as a vehicle for water into the city—tying the nature that is normally inaccessible for us in the urban context—but also acting as a public infrastructure intimate to human relationships. We ascribe new social meaning to these objects by linking them with broader concepts of sanitation, aesthetics, accessibility, community, and social justice. The projects that we selected for this exhibition will prompt critical questions such as: What does it mean to provide free access to drinking water? To whom is that access extended? What does “public” mean in the context of the public drinking fountain? How can public drinking fountains make visible urban relationships to water? This exhibition allows visitors to be reflective of their own personal relationships with water, public infrastructure, and the city, relationships that have been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

HALOA wants to show that drinking fountains can be one of the best ways to merge a country and a city. Drinking fountains other than being just a simple structure that is uniting a community by gathering human beings around an object and making them share this object, can also interconnect nature with the city through the dynamic movement of living beings. Fountains can be a tool of merging natural world with man-made one by creating a space that is visible and accessible not only to people that fit a stereotypical image of a person, but also to the minority groups and those living beings who exist with humans and are big part of the city, but are often ignored – animals. By uniting city’s residents in a public space, we can create a visible relationship between the city and water – a free-flowing public resource. One can think that through water fountains, water is controlled and trapped and eventually loses its “naturalness”. However, through a careful thinking and designing, it is possible to create a fountain that does not damage the idea of a “healthy” urban relationship with water.

The Selected Projects and Spatial Experience

The drinking fountain projects included in this exhibition map the evolution of mundane public drinking fountains over time and provide different interpretations of our relationship with public infrastructure and the urban environment. We begin with a brief introduction of the early history of the public drinking fountain, which was installed in the 19th century in cities across Western Europe and the United States as a defense against the twin epidemics of cholera and alcoholism. We then segue into a discussion of potential limits of the idea of the public, using segregated water fountains in the United States South during the Jim Crow era as a case study. Next, we look at several contemporary public drinking fountains and explore how design choices can similarly work to expand or contract the idea of the public, alternately inviting or discouraging widespread use. We examine further what it would mean to create a drinking fountain that is truly accessible to the public, using the example of a lead-contaminated fountain in a Philadelphia elementary school to demonstrate the multiple ways that inaccessibility can manifest, then showcasing how recent projects in New York City and in the Cambodian village of Sneung turn water fountains into sites of community and civic engagement. Finally, we return to the water sources themselves, offering examples of recent initiatives to design sustainable drinking fountains and assessing the potential value in making the connection between urban drinking fountains and nature more explicit through design.