From Construction to Color, GENESIS Educates PSP/Deck Expo Attendees in Pre-Show Courses

At the 2021 International Pool | Spa | Patio Expo, co-located with Deck Expo (PSP/Deck Expo), GENESIS held three education courses—GENESIS Construction School: Concrete Pools, Fluid Hydraulics for Pools & Spas and Color Theory and Its Application.  

Here is a look at those.  

Color Theory and Its Application  

“Color is an illusion. When the eye sees color, it is being fooled because the world is completely colorless.”  

In GENESIS’ Color Theory and Its Application course, attendees weren’t just learning, but doing.  

Instructor Feras Irikat, the director of Design & Marketing at Lunada Bay Tile, had his students paint and mix colors as they discussed color psychology, how color affects the viewer, color’s influence on purchasing decisions—and more.  

The objective for painting is not to create works of art, he said.   

“I tell them I’m training your eye because a lot of times people don't understand the fact that color is just like anything else—you need to practice to know it,” Irikat explained. “So, practicing color through actually creating color is the way you engage your eyes to understand how colors developed. And now you see color no longer in a two-dimensional world. You actually see it in a three-dimensional world.  

“In this specific course, we really target color, like what is color? How do people see it? How do people engage with it, why does it generate certain emotional responses? Why does it generate certain physical responses from us as well?” Irikat told Pool & Spa Professional. “We talk about the journey of the language of color from the day of color started being an object of research to how is colored being used today. Not just in like design aesthetic but and as a functional element of daily life.  

“So they're here to learn how to use color to both as an aesthetic but also on how to use it as a function to create a certain way to navigate that environment, generate feelings, emotional and physical responses from the audience that's going to use that environment.”   

Fluid Hydraulics for Pools & Spas  

Terry Brannon, engineering faculty chair for GENESIS, led a 16-hour course on engineering—with 11 of those covering hydraulics for swimming pools and spas.  

"We teach the principles of water—static water, the dynamic and moving water,” he told Pool & Spa Professional. “We cover the principles of head loss pump design pump selection, and we actually calculate the head losses through a typical swimming pool system so we can come up with a total dynamic head, which is always on somebody's mind, and help them select a pump.   

"We talked about the safety aspects of main drains and we covered the energy codes for the state of Texas and the federal government's energy codes, and the APSP codes promulgated by PHTA covering residential swimming pool efficiency and energy code,” he continued. “We covered the safety aspects. We covered energy efficiency quite thoroughly. We covered the hydraulics of nozzles, we covered hydraulics or open channel flow, partial flow and pipe and we teach people how to do that.   

"In addition to that, we provide them a spreadsheet that enables them to automate that calculation in their home offices. We don't give them that spreadsheet until they complete the class,” he concluded.   

Jason Ellis, senior project manager at Cascade Custom Pools (Austin, Texas), said he could apply the course teachings—"everything from start to finish"—to his own business.  

Yvette Atkins, the president and COO of Waterworks Pool Service (Dallas) said the course was a “goldmine of information.”   

“We were learning about fluid hydraulics, total dynamic head, how to calculate head loss,” she said. “Understanding the activity of weirs and how to calculate what you need in a catch basin. It's 50 years of knowledge is being passed along to us and the resources are phenomenal. And then the materials that they give to us post-course are materials that would take about 50 years to create.”   

GENESIS Construction School: Concrete Pools  

The Construction School course is a three-day intensive school that encompasses all of the necessary disciplines for building a structurally sound water vessel.  

Topics covered within the school include site analysis, introductory fluid engineering, geotechnical and structural engineering that includes a review of difficult sites, shotcrete, waterproofing, tile, interior finishes, coping, and concrete decking. The course concludes with an interactive walkthrough of a complex project from start to finish. This program is designed to move each student through all phases of concrete pool construction in great detail.  

Speakers included Bannon, Greg Andrews, principal, National Tile and Stone Authority; Randy Dukes, national technical advisor, SW Florida Sales Aquavations; Rocky Wisely, owner and operator, Serenity Hardscapes LLC;  Skip Phillips, Skip Phillips, LLC; Tom Dankel, VP Aquamatic Cover Systems; and Travis Bozick, principal and VP, P.E. C.T. Brannon Corporation.