The pool as piazza
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Swimming, Australia, Politics, Urbanism, Photography

The pool as piazza

The public pool as Australia’s public space

The Australian pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale focuses not simply on buildings, thankfully, but on what is almost the absence of a building, the inverse of a building: the pool. In doing so, it actually reveals deeper currents running through Australian architecture than most buildings do.

Curated for the Australian Institute of Architects by the team of Amelia Holliday, Isabelle Toland and Michelle Tabet, the pavilion’s exhibit is accompanied by a fine book, ‘The Pool’, which lovingly explores the rich terrain and complex conditions of the Australian pool, ultimately making a case for it as the authentically antipodean contribution to urbanism, a distinctly Australian public place, the country’s piazza. For a culture typically seen as oriented towards the playa, the pool is its plaça. In fact far more interesting, diverse and widespread across the continent than the beach, the Australian pool is both the deep past of the country—and the book does a good job of describing the indigenous Australian understanding of pools, in all their myriad forms—but perhaps also its future, at a time when genuinely public places are as threatened in Australia as elsewhere.

The book pivots around eight interviews with Australians, each embodying a particular position as regards the idea of the pool, and each framing their responses through personal memories as much as general observations. As you might imagine, some of the interviews reveal more of interest than others, with the contributions of great contemporary Australian writers Anna Funder and Christos Tsiolkas being particularly insightful.

Yet the way that Olympian Ian Thorpe reflects lyrically on the sensory experience of swimming, on the peculiar relations of the body in underwater space, is unexpectedly fascinating. Most of all, he describes the Australian pool as a place for serious swimming — which most Australians do, and which demarcates the pool culture there—but also how it exemplifies the balancing act of architecture, between body, space and programme:

Most sport is being very good at this kind of close spatial awareness of your own body but it’s also taking in the environment that you are in to create a performance.

Equally racial politics are framed here through the interview with Hetti Perkins, daughter of leader of the ‘Freedom Ride’, Charles Perkins, who defied the racist segregation in the municipal pool at Moree, New South Wales, in 1965. That the pool was site of one of the key events in Australian racial politics speaks volumes. The Freedom Ride ‘invasion’ of the pool, reveals its political potency—perhaps more so than a building, or even the square, the traditional site of political protest, due to the visceral fact of bodies sharing the same water—or not. As Perkins points out here, access to the pool concerns,

“the right of children to enjoy themselves, to have a swim, to have a good time, to mix with other kids, to just have fun and share in the opportunities that this country has to offer. The irony that they were denied access to these resources, as the First People of this country, people that have lived in that land for a millennia, is just sad.”

The interviews are framed through startling photography, revealing the diversity of Australian urban terrain as much as its outback, though we can’t help but marvel at the the myriad possibilities of the naturally occurring pools in the farther-flung Australian environments — and not simply limited to the billabong. To some extent, these could be useful precursors for a handful of newly constructed, naturally-filtered pools (something that Nordic and Central European public pools are increasingly good at, and which Australia does need to catch up with. Only a fine naturally self-filtering backyard pool, at the Fairfield House by Kennedy Nolan Architects, is noted here — a larger municipal version of this, in a major Australia city, would be a breakthrough.)