描述
Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built from, until now no one has investigated the swimming pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America’s infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the pondI, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar hole—the domestic swimming pool—and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieh-century modernism.
At one level, the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. And at still another leve, it is a material philosophy of water. Van Leeuwen explores the human relationship to water from a variety of view-points: social, religious, artistic, sexual, psychological, technical, and above all architectural. Throughout the book, he weaves a series of analogies to three emblematic animals-frog, swan, and penguin—that represent the three prevailing human attitudes toward water: hydrophilia, hydrophobia, and ambivalence. The book’s many illustrations—drawings, plans, and photographs—come from an unusual variety of sources, creating what is surely the most provocative visual archive of the swimming pool ever assembled.
