New York is a city that has everything - everything but clean water for swimming. After decades of industrialization and neglect, the city’s waterways are filthy, and thus inaccessible to the city’s citizens. Three bold designers from New York grew impatient waiting for the city’s authorities to clean up the East River, and so they decided to take it into their own hands to carve out a slither of the river for leisure. Coming soon to New York, it's a floating water-filtering pool!
New York's East River offers a beautiful reflection of the city’s dramatic skyline, it services the cruises and ferries, but it fails the people. Except a microscopic sub-culture of swimmers who brave the polluted waters, the vast majority of New Yorkers never dip their toes in the river. On blisteringly hot summer days New York’s parks are brimming with people vying for a spot of shade. So it’s no wonder that: “the project came about because, quite frankly, when it gets really hot and gross in the summers in New York, there would be nothing better than jumping into the river”, say the designers of +Pool, Dong-Ping Wong, Archie Lee Coates and Jeff Franklin.
The pool is designed to float in the East River, and much like a gigantic strainer dropped into the river, the filtration system embedded in the pool’s membrane will ensure that only clean water will gush into the pool. The pool will simultaneously eject half a million gallons of filtered water back into the river every day, making a demonstrable environmental impact. These baby steps in cleaning-up the river are critical because they will engage the public’s interest in doing so, and hopefully propel the authorities to invest in a wide-scale clean-up - hopefully enabling New Yorkers to swim in the East River for the first time in over a hundred years!
New York is bursting at the seams. Its vibrant ecosystem is ring-fenced by the water, but +Pool could change that. Designed in the shape of an iconic plus, the Olympic-sized +Pool would offer four different zones: Kids’ Pool, Sports Pool, Lap Pool, and last but not least Lounge Pool. The designers have vehemently rejected the proposal to make it a member’s club because they want it to become a vibrant social arena catering to everyone, which it should be able to with its 9,000 square feet of surface.
A pool for everyone, funded by everyone. +Pool promises to be one of the largest crowd-funded civic projects the world has ever seen, thus far. Spurred on by the overwhelmingly positive response from the public, a technical thumbs-up from Arup (a prestigious engineering company), and idea proofing from IDEO (a top design consultancy), the +Pool team are taking to Kickstarter to raise the capital to see their vision come to life.
This side of the Atlantic, in Copenhagen, we are fortunate enough to have exceptionally clean urban waterways. The harbour is brimming with ferries, kayaks, and swimmers co-existing happily. Perhaps most famously, the Copenhagen Harbour Bath designed by architecture giants PLOT (now BIG and JDS), is the epitome of a modern urban beach. Open to the elements, it offers aesthetically pleasing recreational bathing facilities, minus the closeted chlorine smell of indoor pools that too often breed a culture of sporty laps rather than sociable lounging.
+Pool, coming soon to a dirty river near you!
