The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (Graham Foundation / MIT Press Series in Contemporary Architectural Discourse)

About this book

Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built form until now no one has investigated the swimming pool as a quintessentially modern and American space reflecting Americas infatuation with hygiene skin and recreation. In The Springboard in the Pond Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar holethe domestic swimming pooland discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. At one level the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story permanently altered. At another level it is the story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. And at still another level it is a material philosophy of water. Van Leeuwen explores the human relationship to water from a variety of viewpoints: social religious artistic sexual psychological technical and above all architectural. Throughout the book he weaves a series of analogies to three emblematic animalsfrog swan and penguinthat represent the three prevailing human attitudes toward water: hydrophilia hydrophobia and ambivalence. The books many illustrationsdrawings plans and photographscome from an unusual variety of sources creating what is surely the most provocative visual archive of the swimming pool ever assembled. This book is the second in a planned tetralogy by the author with each volume centered on the relationship of architecture to one of the four classical elements: sky water fire and earth. The first volume was The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (MIT Press 1988). The third volume Columns of Fire: Architecture and Destruction is currently in preparation.