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

" The Springboard in the Pond is a bracing intellectual plunge. A searching exploration of manners, morals, and darker truths in cultural and architectural history, it is both insightfully serious and wildly funny." Thomas S. Hines , Los Angeles Times"[R]ichly written and generously illustrated... van Leeuwen succeeds in showing us the depths beneath the tinest ripples of history." Phil Patton , Civilization "At a moment where 'all that is solid' seems precarious,Thomas van Leeuwen's History of the Swimming Pool is an heroicand timely attempt to theorize an architecture of the liquid." Rem Koolhaas " The Springboard in the Pond is a bracing intellectual plunge. A searching exploration of manners, morals, and darker truths in cultural and architectural history, it is both insightfully serious and wildly funny." Thomas S. Hines , Los Angeles Times "[R]ichly written and generously illustrated... van Leeuwen succeeds in showing us the depths beneath the tinest ripples of history." Phil Patton , Civilization

A dazzling reflection on the American swimming pool as an icon of modernism and a social, architectural, and psychological phenomenon. 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 America's infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar hole-the domestic swimming pool-and 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 animals-frog, swan, and penguin-that represent the three prevailing human attitudes toward water: hydrophilia, hydrophobia, and ambivalence. The books 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. 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, The Springboard in the Pond, is currently in preparation.