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.
A decade later, in 1934, Lucien Pollet designed the Piscine Pontoise in Paris, evoking both the cold corridors of ocean liners and the 18th-century bathhouses that once lined the Seine.
Some important pools happened by accident. In 1958, after Boris Iofan’s win in the Palace of the Soviets architecture competition, the project was scrapped and the massive crater dug for its foundation was filled with water. It became the Moskva Pool—the largest open-air heated pool in the world. Today, the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior stands in its place.
At the Stahl House, in Los Angeles, designed by Pierre Koenig and built on the edge of a ridge in 1956, the pool was a stipulation for the bank loan, meant to maintain the house’s value on such a precarious perch. It seemed to spill off the edge of the building into the glittering Hollywood Hills. In the 1980s, Koolhaas himself designed one for his family in Saint-Cloud, France—both elegant and electric blue.
Innovation hasn’t slowed. In 2011, Tadao Ando completed two tranquil pools at Casa Monterrey in the Sierra Madre mountains: one, designed as a reflecting pool, has a shallow pebble bottom; the other mirrors the blue-gray color of the surrounding peaks.
In Extraordinary Pools, Naina Gupta collects 49 pools—accidental, aspirational, and artistic. Designed in the 20th and 21st centuries, these places for floating have shaped not just the idea of home but the principles of design itself. “What is a pool?” the introduction asks. “It is surely not just a hole. A hole implies that it can be filled. Though many have tried to fill an empty pool with other functions, its emptiness continues to shadow everything else that’s there.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at Air Mail
