POOL TIME: Collective Equipment for Living

On June 24, 1936, thousands of New Yorkers experienced a civic spectacle unlike any other. Mayor La Guardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses officially opened Hamilton Fish Pool in the Lower East Side with marching bands and fireworks, the first of eleven WPA-funded pools that would open that summer to provide monumental new recreation facilities for millions of over-heated and Depression-strapped New Yorkers. Over the next half-century, New York City, along with many cities across the US, built impressive networks of municipal pools as ways for people to cool down, exercise, and play, but also as new focal points for civic pride and community. Most pools were segregated until the 1964 Civil Rights Act expanded the notion of community, quickly revealing the widespread racism present in society. As large populations of predominantly middle-class white people flocked to newly created private suburban pools, municipalities stopped funding public pools. Since 1972, funding for maintaining existing public pools has plummeted and only five new public pools have been constructed in NYC.

On June 18, 2024, eighty-eight years after that first grand poolside extravaganza, NYC Mayor Eric Adams pledged more than $1 billion in investments to improve, build, and maintain New York City’s public pools over the next five years, representing the highest investment in swimming infrastructure since the 1970s. How should this money be spent? What are the untapped architectural possibilities of these existing pools as more than just summer recreation spots? Could they be reimagined as year-long community, health, cultural, or education spaces? How can their reach and impact be expanded?

Important municipal services — trash collection, public libraries, clean water, safe streets, power, wifi, education, shelter, medical services, transport, and yes, public pools — provide the collective equipment for living together. We believe that these seemingly banal forms of civic infrastructure deserve nurturing and renewal, upkeep and expansion, to not just sustain us individually, but empower us to collectively participate in the continual remaking of our community.

Specifically, the studio will look at the eleven original WPA funded public pools and ask how these facilities might be renovated or expanded to better serve their communities. We will closely observe, map, and analyze the existing, as a way to develop radically pragmatic spatial design proposals for each site — in the form of buildings, landscape, or new systems of infrastructure.

As we think projectively about the relationship between water, health, leisure, and politics in the unique case of NYC’s existing public pool network, we will also engage more broadly with issues of ecology, gentrification, public space, decarbonization, and inequality, asserting our own opinions and spatial provocations in this real-world, real-time design challenge.