The pool as piazza
The public pool as Australia’s public space
The Australian pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale focuses not simply on buildings, thankfully, but on what is almost the absence of a building, the inverse of a building: the pool. In doing so, it actually reveals deeper currents running through Australian architecture than most buildings do.
Curated for the Australian Institute of Architects by the team of Amelia Holliday, Isabelle Toland and Michelle Tabet, the pavilion’s exhibit is accompanied by a fine book, ‘The Pool’, which lovingly explores the rich terrain and complex conditions of the Australian pool, ultimately making a case for it as the authentically antipodean contribution to urbanism, a distinctly Australian public place, the country’s piazza. For a culture typically seen as oriented towards the playa, the pool is its plaça. In fact far more interesting, diverse and widespread across the continent than the beach, the Australian pool is both the deep past of the country—and the book does a good job of describing the indigenous Australian understanding of pools, in all their myriad forms—but perhaps also its future, at a time when genuinely public places are as threatened in Australia as elsewhere.
The book pivots around eight interviews with Australians, each embodying a particular position as regards the idea…
