Temporary Pavilion
Utrecht, Netherlands
2019
Designed and constructed on-site for RAUM Festival in Utrecht within raumlaborberlin, the project reinterpreted Rem Koolhaas's fictional floating swimming pool from Delirious New York as a temporary urban installation.
Part swimming pool, part ship, the project embraced the ambiguity between utopia and irony. Temporarily anchored in Utrecht, it appeared ready to continue its imagined journey.
Team —
raumlaborberlin: Axel Timm, Marina Urošević, Katharina S.
Role —
Architectural Intern
Design development, construction
Photos —
Marina Urošević, raumlaborberlin
Website —
raumlaborberlin
"One day they discovered that if they swarm in unison – in regular synchronised laps from one end of the pool to the other – the pool would begin to move slowly in the opposite direction."²
The floating swimming pool traveling from Moscow in 1923 to Manhattan in 1976 becomes a leitmotif, an idea that endures, despite the repression of communism and the uniformity of capitalism. As a powerful concept, the pool drifts through ideologies, survives systems, and becomes simultaneously a utopia and an irony.
Such a pool is envisioned in Utrecht in 2019 — a floating pool within a dense, new, and slow urban environment. Its irony is further emphasized by the form of a ship, always ready to sail of through the streets of Utrecht, and later on, Berlin.