A visual feast of 49 weird, wonderful and architecturally astounding swimming pools from around the world.

This book is a sumptuous celebration of swimming pools as playgrounds of pioneering design and architectural excess. Banish memories of crowded leisure centres and sun lounger-clad lidos, these are pools designed for pleasure, not purpose. Swimming pools are no longer simply places to swim, they are versatile sites of activity and excess. They can be vital lifelines providing communities with safe access to water, domestic symbols of affluence, and the avant-garde spectacle of hotel developers.

Naina Gupta uncovers some of the most spectacular swimming pools from around the world, including Berthold Lubetkin's modernist Penguin Pool at London Zoo, the world's largest infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands, Ricardo Bofill's blood-red garden pool in Spain, and London's unparalleled Sky Pool. Extraordinary Pools also includes 4 extended essays on various aspects of pool culture, such as the use of empty swimming pools in California by skateboarders. 

Illustrated throughout with awe-inspiring colour photography, Extraordinary Pools is a mosaic of exceptional public and private pools, reasserting the protean quality of the swimming pool as a space of activity, pleasure and excess.



Naina Gupta is an architect with degrees from both Bangalore University and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She is a registered architect in India and has a decade of experience working in architectural practices. She is currently teaching at the Architectural Association while also devoting time to researching the protean quality of swimming pools around the world. She lives in London.

Introduction

• Chapter 1: Progressive Visions
• Chapter 2: A Matter of National Importance
• Chapter 3: A Pool with a View
• Chapter 4: A Very Private Affair
• Chapter 5: 'Natural' Pools
• Chapter 6: Free Form, Free From
• Chapter 7: Pool Culture
• Chapter 8: In Suspension

Where to Find the Pools

Index

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Picture credits