Prentiss Properties Waterfall Project

In April of 2000, we were asked to help with an unusu­al prob­lem at 123 N. Wack­er Dri­ve in Chica­go, Illi­nois. This is a down­town high-rise office build­ing built some twelve years ago. It has a beau­ti­ful mar­ble lob­by. A very unique and beau­ti­ful fea­ture in this lob­by is a mag­nif­i­cent forty foot high mar­ble water­fall. Water is sup­posed to cas­cade down the water­fall and into two lev­els of ponds where it is pumped back to the top.

The water­fall leaked onto the mar­ble floor and into the under­ly­ing base­ment as soon as it was turned on. The water on the floor cre­at­ed a very dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion in the high traf­fic lob­by and the water­fall was shut down. Sev­er­al attempts were made to seal it with­out suc­cess. Final­ly, the own­ers decid­ed that keep­ing it run­ning was too risky. It had been inop­er­a­ble since the build­ing was opened.

We were called in by new man­agers of the build­ing who were com­mit­ted to mak­ing this beau­ti­ful fea­ture oper­a­tional. Work­ing with the man­age­ment peo­ple, we were able to deter­mine the prob­a­ble source of the leak. A sim­ple fix would be to coat the joints, but it would not have been aes­thet­i­cal­ly acceptable.

The mar­ble cap on top of the pond wall was removed and the hol­low was filled with Moun­tain Grout. The mate­r­i­al expand­ed and trav­eled to all of the leak sources. Great care was tak­en to mon­i­tor the material’s expan­sion so as not to dam­age the marble.

The water­fall was turned on two days lat­er. One small leak was deter­mined to be caused by faulty plumb­ing. The pond itself is now hold­ing water as orig­i­nal­ly designed.