The NOAA Wave Pool (also concatenated as “Wavepool”) is a kinetic sculpture created by Jim Sanborn. It is located in the courtyard of Silver Spring Metro Center 4, on the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) campus in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The sculpture is an ingenious pool that uses an airfoil (water foil?) to push out water in a number of different patterns. The water rushes up an inclined plane, forming waves, which crash into a stone wall. The result looks very much like ocean waves crashing into a stony shore along the northeastern coast of the United States. Jim Sanborn named the sculpture Coastline, but almost everyone calls it the “Wave Pool,” and there is no plaque or signage to indicate the artist’s choice of name. Hint to someone: this work of art needs decent interpretive signage.
When the wave pool made its debut in 1993, a commercial eatery opened in the building next to it, named “Pond Wave Cafe.” You could write an interesting essay on the linguistic transformation from the artist’s name of Coastline to the commonly used term “wave pool” to the cafe’s name “Pond Wave Cafe.” Alas, the cafe closed and was replaced with another, under a different, unrelated name having nothing to do with waves.
Though the wave pool is on the NOAA campus, most of the “campus” consists of commercially-owned and operated buildings, with NOAA being the principal lessee. Foulger-Pratt, the developer of the campus, was required as part of the construction permitting process to include a park, with some kind of art in the park. Exactly how this requirement resulted in Coastline is not clear, but one thing is clear: NOAA does not own the Coastline sculpture, or Discovery Park, or even most of the “NOAA” buildings. They are owned by a private commercial property company. This is a major source of consternation to NOAA employees, as they have adopted the park, and particularly the wave pool, and are strongly possessive of both.
The kinetic heart of the sculpture is under Discovery Park, in an underground garage. When the wave pool is operating (generally only in daylight hours, during weekdays, during mid-spring to mid-fall), you can hear the mechanism throughout the garage: a giant, steady, metallic breathing sound. At night, the pool is lighted from underwater, creating an attractive bluish glow. From mid-fall to mid-spring, the pool is drained, and maintenance performed. Yes, even ocean waves require maintenance.
While spectacular, Coastline is not Jim Sanborn’s most famous sculpture; that would be Kryptos. The two works of art are not at all comparable. Coastline is open to the public, located just a few feet from a Maryland state highway; Kryptos is very securely located in one of the most inaccessible spots on the planet, the courtyard of the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley, Virginia. Revealed in November 1990, the metal sculpture has a 97-character message buried within a 2,000 character puzzle, divided into four sections on two half-cylinder metal slabs. Decrypting the message has become a passion for many with access, but the message has yet to be deciphered.
Lingua, another Sanborn sculpture with a similar message theme, consists of two 16-foot tall metal cylinders in the one of the lobbies of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, DC. Installed in 2002, the cylinders have portions of classic texts cut into them in English, Iroquois, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Ethiopian, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian.
Both Kryptos and Lingua are spectacular in their own way, yet they literally are not as moving as Coastline. Neither features hundreds of gallons of recycled water, crashing into stone cliffs. Neither of them offers an expansive stone bench for having lunch, or just staring at the waves. Neither of them move.
Movement is also one of the mysteries of Coastline. According to many different sources, including Wikipedia and the artist’s website, the wave action is controlled by a real-time modem link to a tide gauge in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This doesn’t sound quite right, however, as the waves are generated far more frequently than “normal” ocean waves. An ocean wave has miles, possibly hundreds of miles, to form, and the waves are larger, higher, and less frequent than the faster, choppier waves of the Wave Pool. If you slow them down (by taking high-rate video and then showing it as normal speed), the Wave Pool looks, and sounds, more like an ocean wave. But this is not “real-time” in any sense of the word. There may be a computer link to Woods Hole, but exactly what kind of data is collected, and how it is used, isn’t clear.
Dozens of photos were taken to create the video shown above, which illustrates how the Wave Pool works. Press the button below to see photos taken from a different angle on the same day.
The Wave Pool has also proved to be a good source of material for those writing a web page or a press release on the ocean. National Ocean Service, the part of NOAA most devoted to the ocean, is mostly housed in a building facing the Wave Pool. This is splendid, but the building is still over 100 miles from any ocean. If you need a quick photo of a wave curling over at the crest, or smashing into something, it is unbelievably handy to have an active wave pool right out the front door.
