Studio tutor: Leonid Slonimskiy (Kosmos)

Assistant: Bertrand Van Dorp (RDVA)

Not Only A Swimming Pool focuses on swimming pools out of season as a resource and poses a question on their potential for development with limited new construction.

We, as a society, build and demolish many buildings while there is a huge amount of abandoned, little-used space that can serve as a resource for new functions. In order to decrease the environmental impact of architecture, we would like to increase the density of use instead of increasing the density of built volume. Build less, use more!

For more than eight months huge urban areas of open swimming pools, including their surrounding parks, buildings and infrastructure, lie unused, often fenced off. Can we imagine a building that functions intelligently all year round? How could we superpose and overlap various programmes and processes in this same space? The studio takes an open pool as a programmatic typology that has by nature a very low density of use while occupying large strategic locations in cities. Students are invited to give the pools a new lease of life, new meaning outside of their working hours, therefore activating these sites and offering cities what they are currently missing.

The studio’s main principles are:

- Building as a resource

- Do not build or do not build much

- Maximum effect with minimum resources

- Programmatic opportunism

- Overlapping uses

Ten swimming pools are chosen in French-speaking Switzerland. The final outcome shows the functioning of these spaces both in and off season/working hours: existing buildings where new interventions and uses overlap.