New York Governor Hochul has announced a partnership with the nonprofit Friends of + POOL to open the first urban river-sourced swimming facility in the United States. Utilizing + POOL’s design and technology, the 2,000-square-foot plus-shaped swimming pool is set to open in New York City’s East River in the summer of 2024. In 2010, four young designers, Archie Lee Coates IV, Dong-Ping Wong, Jeffrey Franklin, and Oana Stanescu, established + POOL with the goal of providing New Yorkers with access to free and safe river swimming. Now the state promised to invest $16 million to pilot and scale the system, hoping to expand it across the state of New York.
A new set of images showcases BIG's One High Line development nearing completion. Located on the ‘Architecture Row’ in New York, the coupled twisting towers share the Hudson River skyline with neighbors such as Frank Gehry’s IAC building, Renzo Piano’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jean Nouvel’s The Chelsea Nouvel ('100 Eleventh Avenue'), along with future works by Thomas Heatherwick and other renown architects. The two condominium towers designed by BIG are organized to define a central public courtyard, activating the public space with retail and commercial facilities. The towers’ exterior and the majority of the interior are completed, with the courtyard expected to be finished by early 2024.
When one thinks of public spaces, the image of a pool rarely comes to mind. Public spaces are the center of civic life, places where most interactions, activities, and behaviors follow strict social and cultural norms to ensure the safety and comfort of all users. In contrast, swimming and bathing represent something more intimate and primordial, a sensorial experience distinct from any other. In addition to the health benefits, the act of floating in space creates a break from everyday life and its constraints.
As social spaces, public baths and pools offer an even more unusual experience. Here, regular conduct rules and norms no longer apply. Social nudity becomes the new norm, and, as people strip off their clothes, they also lose their status markers, transforming the pool into an egalitarian oasis. Across history, these often-discredited spaces offered a heightened social experience, fostering connections and bringing a new element to dense urban environments. As a typology present since antiquity, public baths and pools have also been a disputed space, as a manifestation of difficult topics such as gender and racial segregation, gentrification, and surveillance in contrast to the freedom they promise.
Few architectural typologies have the power to invoke a sense of being dual-natured quite as the modernist swimming pool can. The design of pools themselves implies that there are moments of activity both above and below the water. Above, and in the more obvious and visible sense, pools act as a space for leisure and athletic training. But underneath the surface, swimming pools have a long-standing history of acting as symbols of surveillance, death, and social conditions associated with an economic class.
Manufacturer Compass Pools has unveiled a new concept for the world's first 360-degree infinity pool. Designed for a skyscraper rooftop in London, the 600,000-liter pool would offer views of the city's skyline from all sides. Called Infinity London, the project would be made from cast acrylic and feature transparent sides and floors, allowing visitors to see swimmers in the pool above them.
When you tap an Instagram geolocation, the nine most popular posts in that location float to the top. Sometimes, there's an uncanny similarity to these posts: near-identical pictures of smoothie bowls, tiled floors, or neon signs. In part, a place’s popularity on Instagram is a domino effect—one person posts a picture of a mural (Wynwood Walls, anyone?), and then everyone does. But a new Instagram Design Guide from Valé Architects suggests that some design features might be inherently more Instagrammable than others. Valé’s guide is interesting for its quasi-scientific analysis of Instagram aesthetic, but it also has real implications in the architecture world; a building’s popularity on social media (in this case, its Instagramability) can influence its perception in the non-digital world. Here are some of the traits that Valé says make a space successful on Instagram:
Historically, large city-changing projects have depended on the personal interests of a powerful individual: someone able to swim across both political and financial waters. But recently, projects like the High Line have shown the power and potential of projects envisioned and led by local communities.
Back in 2011 we visted our friends at CASE in their West Village office and they introduced us to a small firm across the hall: Family. While the team was working hard on a model in the middle of their large table, partner Dong-Ping Wong showed us some of their recent projects. One of them immediately caught our attention. A floating pool for Manhattan. In the form of a cross, it would sit in the East River, filtering its waters into four pools. This amazing -- and seemingly crazy -- idea was tantalizing.
+ POOL, the project (initiated by a duo of young architects) to float a public swimming pool in New York's Hudson River, has reached its latest kickstarter goal - making it the largest civic project to ever be crowdfunded online. As Architizer's Karen Wong reports, it's a remarkable gamechanger for architects (a profession where success often comes well into one's golden years) as well as public space in general: "It's a resounding demonstration of the public’s belief in young architects to rethink public space and manifest the untapped capital of waterways to benefit the common good." Read the full article here.
I guess there’s nothing better to sit back and relax after a long week than a pool. Fun and refreshing, pool houses are just great. So now, we bring you our Round Up of previously featured pool houses on ArchDaily.
