Speaking to Youth
by Mark Fuller,
CEO of WET Design and designer of the cauldron for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. A University graduate, he has designed more than 100 fountains for venues ranging from Disney’s Epcot Center to Tokyo Dome to the Bellagio Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, which features the largest fountain ever built.
Learning has always been fun for me. I like building projects from what I learn. I have built them in my basement from the time I was a kid.
My first neat job was building special effects for Disney. I got the job because of all the pictures I had of projects I had built while at the U. I had built a fire-billowing alter for a theatre class at Pioneer Memorial Theatre. After class, with the help of one of the professors, I built an electronic circuit board in the Physics Department that made any light bulb flicker like a bonfire. The only difference between my school fire projects and my company’s Olympic Cauldron “project” was just the really big jump in size.
Things you learn stay with you. When I was studying engineering at the U, in class the teacher showed us a small plastic model of water spilling off of a dam. At the bottom of the spillway, the water made a big wave, called a hydraulic jump. About 20 years later, when I was trying to think of a fun, new fountain idea for a shopping center plaza, I remembered that class and used the same idea to create a big wave fountain for a project in Newport
Beach, Calif.
To me the coolest thing about the U was that I could pick a lot of interesting classes and learn things just because they were really fascinating. I eventually found something out of the ordinary to do with all that learning.