In 1976, the young architects Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp wrote an essay that took the form of a surreal short story. Set in 1923, “The Story of a Pool” is about a group of Moscow architecture students who design a floating pool—for Koolhaas, a symbol of design purity. Decades later, amid Soviet adversity, the pool eventually propels itself across the Atlantic, arriving in New York like a drifting Utopian relic.
The essay is a reminder that, for architects, pools have long held symbolic weight. In 1925, when Adolf Loos met Josephine Baker, he sketched a fantasy house for her in which one room was a windowed pool, like a human-size aquarium. A lucky viewer might have caught a glimpse of the singer underwater.
