From Turrell to Hockney, 8 Artists Who Designed Extraordinary Swimming Pools
Few
things evoke summer more than the swimming pool, its inviting blue
water offering a respite from sweltering heat. Pools have also served as
an unexpected medium for artists, from David Hockney to Katherine
Bernhardt. From filling pools with diet soda to painting them with
signature patterns, these eight artists have designed extraordinary—if
not always functional—swimming pools around the world.
James Turrell, Baker Pool, 2002-2008
Throughout his 50-year career, Turrell
has become famous for manipulating the perception of light and space in
mesmerizing installations. So it’s only fitting that, during a party to
celebrate the completion of Baker Pool in 2008, a
discombobulated guest unwittingly walked down the stairs and straight
into the water; Turrell himself pulled her out. The LED-lined pool,
commissioned for the basement of a barn on a Greenwich, Connecticut
estate, was the first such work the artist completed in the United
States. A previous Turrell-designed swimming pool, built for a French
cultural center, featured a central shaft that swimmers had to dive
under to catch a glimpse of one of the artist’s signature skyscapes.
David Hockney, Roosevelt Hotel, 1988
Known for his bright, airy paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools, Hockney
occasionally used the real thing as his canvas. The most accessible
example is located in Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, where the artist
spent one morning in 1988 covering the pool bottom with a pattern of
swooping half-moon marks. Local officials attempted to paint over the
underwater mural later that year, citing a state safety law that
prohibited the decoration of swimming pools. Informed by a dealer that
the work would likely be valued at $1 million, they quickly changed
their minds and wrote a bill to exempt Hockney’s pool. The work remains
intact to this day.
Mike Bouchet, Flat Desert Diet Cola Pool, 2010
In the case of Bouchet’s Flat Desert Diet Cola Pool, it’s what’s inside that counts. In 2010, the artist filled an entire California swimming pool with Cola Lite,
his homemade, sweetener-free soda, then invited a group of art-world
denizens over to cavort in the syrupy liquid. Bouchet later repeated the
experiment on the roof of Chelsea’s Hotel Americano, hiring two female
bodybuilders to splash around while gallery-goers looked on. Both
installations are part of a series employing Bouchet’s carbonated
beverage as a medium; other works include watery brown canvases painted
with soda (the artist terms it “colachrome”).
Jorge Macchi, Piscina, 2009
In the mid-1990s, Argentinian artist Macchi
began a series of watercolors that merged several incongruous objects
into a single image. In one, a sheep stands on legs made from burnt
matchsticks; in another, the alphabetic tabs of an address book have
been transformed into a bench for a seated figure. The latter served as
the inspiration for Piscina, realized with the help of Brazilian
contemporary art museum Inhotim. One half of the work is crafted from
smooth white cement cut with strips of black granite, forming a
monumental sheet of lined paper. The pool’s focal point, however, is the
staircase of index tabs that descend into the clear blue water.
Samara Scott, Developer, 2016
Much of this young British artist’s work is liquid-based, although one would be ill-advised to take a dip in one of Scott’s
pools. For last year’s edition of Frieze, she gouged large holes in the
floor and filled them with an arresting hodgepodge of ingredients:
water, cooking oil, fabric softener, wax, even food. This month, she has
unveiled her largest project to date—a commission in London’s Battersea
Park, on view through September 25. Scott has transformed the park’s
two Pleasure Garden Fountains, adding multicolored dyes and swaths of
fabric that undulate beneath the surface and engage with the area’s
industrial past.
Katherine Bernhardt, Nautilus Hotel, 2015
Bernhardt’s pool design during last year’s Art Basel in Miami Beach
gave visitors to the Nautilus, a SIXTY Hotel, a chance to swim with
sharks—plus the socks, bananas, and Sharpies that also peppered her
pool-bottom mural. The project,
commissioned by Artsy for Nautilus, also featured Bernhardt-crafted
towels printed with toucans and French fries. Both works serve as prime
examples of the New York-based artist’s signature iconography: a mix of
tropical imagery and city-dweller staples, all rendered in bold, bright
color.
Berthold Lubetkin, Penguin Pool, 1934
This
one is literally for the birds. Lubetkin, a Georgia-born,
Paris-trained, Russian architect, designed this pool for the penguins at
the London Zoo in the 1930s. It was a prime example of pre-war Modern
architecture, earning Lubetkin international praise and establishing his
firm’s reputation as pioneers of the movement. The pool’s distinctive
looping, interlocking walkways were meant to highlight the penguins’
waddling gait. Years later, it was discovered that the sloping paths
were in fact giving the birds arthritis in their feet. The animals have
since been shifted to another habitat, although Lubetkin’s pool
remains—it is now classified as a water feature.
Ed Ruscha, Studio City
Photographed for the first (and only) issue of PUSH! magazine in 1991, this Ruscha-designed
swimming pool features one of the L.A. artist’s signature text-based
works. White tiles are arranged to create an underwater registration
form, confronting swimmers with blanks for their name, address, and
phone number. Ruscha, who made the work for his brother’s Studio City
home, said he considered distorting the words so that they would
straighten out when viewed through the water. In the end, however, he
decided against it—“that would have been an expensive experiment,” he
recalled.
—Abigail Cain
—Abigail Cain
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