«I hate rectangular pools – are lakes and rivers ever rectangular? I want pools for water nymphs, for diving into from a high tree, with a swim-up bar» – Gio Ponti and the organic architecture of pools
Gio Ponti and the pools in Italy – an esprit de geometrie
In the fifties, Gio Ponti designed a pool for the Hotel Royal in Sanremo, filled with seawater and shaped like a lagoon. On the rooftop of the Royal Continental on the seafront in Naples, Ponti wanted his pool, on the tenth floor of the hotel and again filled with seawater, to dialogue with the view of the gulf, with Pizzofalcone Hill and the insular Castel dell’Ovo opposite. Surrounded on three sides by walls, one in a Pompeiian red perhaps borrowed from Barragán, which drew the eye towards the Sorrento Peninsula. The project was published in 1954 on the cover of issue number 291 of Domus, under the title, A pool on the roof.
Pools. Rectangular, square or round, long and narrow like stripes of liquid, oval, irregular and elliptic. Blue, black, emerald green, celadon, infinity pools, lined with marble or onyx, decorated with grecas, relief work and mosaics, shaped to look like Nero’s zither or Elvis Presley’s guitar, palms, stars and butterflies.
Reflective surfaces held in by walls and set on fire by the sun, mirroring patches of sky and clouds that move like fluttering lawn hankies, a virtual reality, a surrealist painting. Water imprisoned by an inclination to control, held hostage by a reassurance instead of nature unknown. Protected alien water, embraced by an esprit de geometrie.
The pool is a physical and mental space – the organic architecture of swimming pools
Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, is lashed by the ocean’s violent waves in an apparent desire to swallow it whole in an unforgiving light. The pool is a physical and mental space balanced on the fine line between an artificial dimension and a natural condition.
Following a path that goes from the Turkish Pamukkale and Gellért in Budapest, through to the countless facilities in Abano and Montegrotto, the steaming ones in the Euganean hills in Veneto, where they have discovered some that date back to Roman times, part of an imperial villa. A pool itself is spurious and ambiguous, even when it is a so-called natural pool, conceived as a pond oxygenated by a deliberate microcosm of plants, fish, insects and organic cycles, with a gravel bottom.
WASP pool in Palm Beach – organic swimming pools
Pools that are perhaps more a thing of beauty than of use for bathing or sport—those photographed by Slim Aarons in the sixties and early seventies. C.Z. Guest’s WASP pool in Palm Beach with its white columns standing out against the ocean. The social ones in Marbella and Acapulco, in addition to the pool designed with the outline of the island, of the La canzone del Mare beach club, founded on Capri by Gracie Fields.
Not to mention Jacques-Henry Lartigue’s obsession with eyes, who, for more than half a century from 1931, immortalized in photos, a pool and a place dear to his heart, the Eden-Roc at the Hotel du Cap in Antibes on the French Riviera. Seductive pools, like the round one with central island complete with bonfire in The Witches of Eastwick, in which Jack Nicholson’s devil ensnares Michelle Pfeiffer to the soundtrack of Nessun dorma.
Then there is the long kiss, half in and half out of the water, between drifter Jesse played by Richard Gere at his peak physically, and Valérie Kaprisky, in Breathless, directed by Jim Mc Bride,1983. Shows of financial power, like the infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands, suspended two hundred meters above the Singapore skyline.
Giorgio de Chirico’s Mysterious Baths and David Hockney paintings
A wound dug out of the ground, an artificial vacuum to fill with continually filtered stagnant water. Californian pools, in the solid, zenith-like blue of a David Hockney painting, inhabited by solitary swimmers or just rippled by shadows tattooed on their bottoms.
Their alienating vocation and colors make them similar to Giorgio de Chirico’s Mysterious Baths, a sculptural composition from 1973 created for the fountain in the garden of Palazzo dell’Arte, in Sempione Park, Milan. Out of the pool emerge two swimmers, a diving board, ball, bathing hut, swan, fish and a spring.
Pools in Milan, Italy. Roberto Cozzi and the Hotel Diana – organic architecture and the library of swimming pools
In 1834, Milan saw the inauguration of Italy’s first public bathing establishment, similar, to get some idea, to the Parisian Piscine Molitor, from the thirties, with its tiered galleries and railings. It was on the site of what is today the Hotel Diana. Still in Milan, in Viale Tunisia, the red-brick and marble quay of the Roberto Cozzi pool was inaugurated in 1934. This 33-meter-long pool was a public bath for travelers and gentlemen, as evidenced by the mosaics, multi-color marble and inlaid floors.
Here, the engineer and architect Luigi Lorenzo Secchi, merged examples of rationalism with the historicism that was so in vogue during fascism. For a long time, it was the first indoor pool in Italy and one of the biggest in Europe, together with the one on Margaret Island in Budapest and the Hallenschwimmbad in the Mitte district in Berlin. It embodies a political and social message dear to the regime.
A marble slab is engraved with a quote by Gabriele d’Annunzio, aimed at the Milanese people and others: Maestri facili nell’esercitare il nuoto debbono essere tutti gli italiani della penisola, disegnata in tante rive ed emersa da tanti mari (All Italians should be masters of swimming, on a peninsula shaped by so many coasts and surrounded by so many seas). Secchi, a specialist, had already built the outdoor Piscina Romano a few years earlier.
A status symbol for the rising middle class in America – The Swimmer, by Franck Perry, 1968
A status symbol for the rising middle class in America in the fifties and sixties that dotted gardens and backyards in mainly residential suburbs. In the plot of the film The Swimmer, by Franck Perry, 1968, Burt Lancaster swims across all the pools in an American city, following an ever-darker route that sees him return home in his swimming costume after realizing just how vast his solitude is.
From the same year, Blake Edwards’ The Party, starring Peter Sellers as the Indian Hrundi V. Bakshi. The rationalist villa, in Richard Neutra style, of producer Fred Clutterbuck, in the Hollywood hills, where the aspiring actor ends up at a dinner party quite by chance, is organized around a pool that runs through it indoors and out, opening and closing thanks to electric controls.
It will become the setting for hundreds of misunderstandings and a series of gags that snowball into catastrophe and fun, with lysergic dreaminess, echoes of the Cold War and oriental philosophies and mystique, rivers of alcohol and pure chaos, to end up invaded by mountains of pink froth, all set to music by Henri Mancini.
La piscine by Jacques Deray from 1969 – Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Jane Birkin, and Maurice Ronet
How many times has La piscine by Jacques Deray from 1969 been mentioned, with Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Jane Birkin, and Maurice Ronet, a thriller with psychological undertones, which marked a new aesthetic genre with its appearance in France.
Today, flying over any Greek island in a helicopter or landing in gusts of wind at an airport in the Cyclades, on Mykonos or Santorini, you can see pools by the dozen, with different patterns and concepts, large and small. Of a turquoise that rivals the Aegean Sea, and almost linked one to another, suspended in mid-air and nestling between the rocks.
At Hadrian’s Villa and Pirro Ligorio in Tivoli, near Rome
The most artistic pool known is the Mohenjo-Daro Great Bath, at the archaeological site in Sindh, south of Larkana in Pakistan. Built 2600 years ago, it belongs to the so-called Indus or Harappa civilization. Every city founded by Roman republican and imperial expansionism, at any latitude and in any climes, in addition to the cardo and decumanus, also had complex spas with swimming pools clad in marble or mosaics, with either cold or warm water, emblems of a culture and an unmistakable social approach.
At Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, the emperor’s residence in the second century C.E., the Canopus, according to the mannerist architect Pirro Ligorio, protégé of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, was the evocation of a branch of the River Nile with its delta, joining the city that bears its name, site of a famous temple to Serapis, with Alexandria of Egypt. Around this pool-channel stood a colonnade with copies of Hellenic sculptures, including the Caryatids in the Erechtheion in Athens, facing the water.
The exedra at the end of the pool houses Hadrian’s imperial triclinium, with the stibadium, the ruler’s reclining seat. It was the venue for parties and banquets of a dreamy nature thanks to the splashes of water, nocturnal staging of naval battles to torchlight and elaborate swimming shows. Performances worthy of the MGM films with Esther Williams, the former freestyle champion who came to fame in 1944 with the film Bathing Beauty, dancing synchronized choreographies in the water. Perhaps dating of Hadrian’s site may be attributed to before 132 C.E., the year the philosopher emperor stayed in Egypt and his favorite, Antinous, died a mysterious death.
Mosaic Pool at the Foro Italico, formerly Foro Mussolini, in Rome
Roman spas were the inspiration for architect Costantino Costantini when Latina was known as Littoria, for his Mosaic Pool at the Foro Italico, formerly Foro Mussolini, in Rome. The covered hall, clad with Carrara and Bardiglio marble, has archaeology inspired decorations by the painter Giulio Rosso, winding their way across the walls and floors. Ornamental themes that widen out around the windows and underline the bronze sculptures by
Silvio Canevari. The humanist from Siena, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, before he became Pope Pius II, in the fifteenth century wrote that dipping into the waters at Bagni di Petriolo allowed him to come into direct contact with the spirit of classicism that was regaining strength.
A library of organic swimming pools – The Roman Pool and Neptune Pool
The most beautiful pool in the world is perhaps still the indoor Roman Pool at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, 250 miles north of Los Angeles, commissioned by the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and designed by Julia Morgan, who started work in 1927, after the outdoor Neptune Pool, built close to the western wing of this residence.
A masterpieces of art deco that is an orgy of mosaics, only completed in 1934-35. Its blue bottom and sides, with spiraling plants and Persian green or golden-yellow decorations, is inspired by Venetian repertoires and those from Byzantine Ravenna. As you enter, your senses dizzy with the perfect mirror of its surface, which doubles the hallucinatory effect of the large windows. Almost 2044 square meters of tesserae laid by Italian hands or by those of Italian descent. The patterns and designs are the work of Camille Solon, a designer whose father was an expert potter at the British manufacturers Minton.
The Swimming-Pool Library: a cult novel by Alan Hollinghurst, published in 1988
The pool is surrounded by columns in which Jay Gatsby, hero of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel is assassinated by mistake, ending an existence intertwined with revenge and delusion, misery and mystery. The Swimming-Pool Library is a cult novel by Alan Hollinghurst, published in 1988.
A gay story set in the London of the eighties, a plot packed with twists and turns, allusions to famous names and revelations through a chain of events and encounters. Our list ends with the status-symbol pool in Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder from 1950.
A gothic snapshot of Hollywood stardom, aspirations to success and lies, which became a tribute to the golden age of silent movies. The film starts with the tale of someone who has just been murdered, Joe Gillis, played by William Holden. The long flashback by the screenwriter goes from his body floating in the pool of a villa on Sunset Boulevard to Los Angeles.
