Splashy (and Suspect) Swimming Pools Are the Hottest Design Trend of 2016

Australia is doing the Venice Architecture Biennale right. For its pavilion at the summer-long architecture festival, which launched late in May, Australia is hosting an adult swim. “The Pool,” the work of urbanist Michelle Tabet and architect duo Isabelle Aileen Toland and Amelia Sage Holliday (Aileen Sage Architects), is more statement than structure.

“The Pool is a lens through which to explore Australian cultural identity,” reads a statement from Holliday and Tabet. “From pools of necessity to the pools of excess, the pool is a key architectural device, a memory, and also a setting. It has the unique ability to evoke both the sacred and the profane.”

This pool also has the ability to evoke memories of Olympic glory: Gold medal–winning swimmers Shane Gould and Ian Thorpe are two of the cultural figures tapped by the pavilion’s creative directors to show just what pools mean to the Australian people. Dan Hill, an associate director at Arup, calls the swimming pool “a distinctly Australian public place, the country's piazza.”

All its cultural bona fides notwithstanding, “The Pool” is bound to be a hit. Venice is sweltering in the summer. More to the point, though, “The Pool” arrives at a time when architects and designers are giving the swimming pool, as a typology, another look.

Floating pools and suspended pools—some echoing designs lost to history, some testing the limits of engineering—are popping up in proposals all around the world. The swimming pool has never been an unpopular idea, but with the rise luxury multi-family housing, its status is rising. Sometimes into the sky.

The floating pool is in

Back in Australia, Melbourne is the latest city to announce plans for a floating swimming pool. Yarra Pools, a proposal that also had its debut at the Venice Architecture Biennale, is a floating pool designed by Studio Octupi for Melbourne’s Yarra River. Melbourne is not the first city to entertain a pool platform that filters the water as it floats along. Hell, Yarra Pools is not even the first floating pool concept by these architects.  

The floating pool concept bubbled up into the global mainstream back in 2011, when the backers of +POOL launched a Kickstarter that raised more than $40,000 to build a floating, self-filtering swimming pool in New York City’s East River with a capacity of nearly 500 swimmers at a time. While the project has made slow progress, +POOL has nevertheless spawned its share of imitators, from a pair of floating pools for the Thames Rivers (designed by Studio Octopi) to Swale, a “floating food forest”—a sort of salad barge—conceived by artist Mary Mattingly.

Building a swimming pool that floats in a river might seem like a whimsical, futuristic idea. As the backers of +POOL note, however, the concept is vintage.

“Floating pools paralleled the development of New York City dating back to the early 19th century, when the city's elite used floating spas located just off the Battery in lower Manhattan,” reads the project website. “After the Civil War, the huge influx of immigrants required bathhouses in the Hudson and East Rivers, as many were without proper bathing facilities in their homes.”

Floating pools are also a proven technology. The Bronx’s Floating Pool Lady beat +POOL to being New York’s first new floating pool in more than a century when it opened in 2007, albeit with less fuss and fanfare than the former’s Kickstarter campaign. There are other floating pools in Berlin, Paris, and Copenhagen.

The suspended pool is out there

Back in August, the backers behind Embassy Gardens, a new housing development near the Battersea Power Station in London’s Nine Elms district, announced plans for a way-above-ground swimming pool. The so-called sky pool would be suspended 10 stories over the ground, connecting two residential towers in one of London’s poshest new districts.

As with the floating pool, the suspended pool is not an isolated project. SHoP Architects, the firm responsible for some of Brooklyn’s most high-profile projects—including the Barclays Center and the forthcoming Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment plan—has designed a suspended pool for Manhattan. Another glass-bottomed pool, in Surat, Gujarat, would link two residential towers. Still another design for a suspended pool recently won a skyscraper competition in Paris.

None of these designs is a reality yet, and each of them comes with the same set of worries: liability, sustainability, and engineering. They are also fraught with class concerns. All of these pools are private amenities thrust into the public space. In London and Manhattan especially, where rents are steep and housing inequality is a gripping concern, suspended swimming pools are bound to be lightning rods. (Figuratively, not literally).

There are some new concepts in swimming-pool design that appear to treat private pools as private pools while still experimenting with the typology. A house designed by Open Platform for Architecture for a cliffside in Lebanon buries the home in the cliff face and deploys a glass-bottomed swimming pool as the project’s ceiling. It’s a dramatic gesture that doesn’t rely solely on its elite status in the way that a private pool simply juxtaposed with public space does.

The public pool still matters

One developer has announced plans for a public pool inside a private building. The Guildhouse design for a skyscraper in London’s Croydon borough features a glass-bottomed pool on the 14th floor that’s free for everyone to use.

Public access is the feature sorely lacking in so many of these new-school pool designs. To the extent that the swimming pool is an important architectural vernacular for Australia or anywhere else, it’s because swimming pools—public swimming pools—mean a shared space for good times. Privatizing pools in the back yards of single-family homes or on the rooftops of multifamily condo buildings diminishes that shared space. And likely ebbs away from the public support necessary to build more of those shared spaces.

The question for the +POOLs of the world: Will they work like the public pools that kids rely on all summer, or will they feel more like private parks? As my colleague Brentin Mock has observed, African-American and Latino residents have different priorities for public parks than white residents. Floating-pool designers need to ensure that their designs are inviting and accessible for people of color and low-income residents. Otherwise, these new pools will be just as inaccessible as the ones suspended over everyone’s heads.