New Yorkers know that swimming in the local waters is a quick way to catch some nasties. But if a project called the +Pool (pronounced “plus pool”) gets built according to plan, the city’s inhabitants could soon find themselves swimming in one of the rivers as soon as 2012.
Of course, you won’t actually dive straight into the river itself. The idea for +Pool is to create a public pool that floats on the river, while the pool’s water will be water from the river that has been filtered through the walls. (A similar floating pool exists in Berlin on the Spree River, but doesn’t have an ambitious filtration concept.) The tri-layer filtration walls removes things such as wildlife, debris, algae, bacteria, and viruses. Four sections comprise a cross-mark design that allows the 9,000-square-foot pool to be divided for, say, a kid’s pool and a lap pool; two modules can also be used as an Olympic-length pool.
Architect Dong-Ping Wong and designers Jeffrey Franklin and Archie Lee Coates IV came up with the idea in June 2010 during a hot summer, who lamented that New Yorkers can’t enjoy a swim despite being surrounded by water. The +Pool concept has already generated lots of interest from various parties, including engineering firm Arup. The designers have spent the past months on research and, working with Arup, studied the feasibility of the filtration system, which Arup has deemed possible.
The idea now needs to enter actual testing of the filtration system by building a filtration wall. The designers are using Kickstarter to help fund the testing phase. If they can raise $500,000, they can build a full-scale mock-up of the wall, but are currently hoping to raise $25,000 to begin the testing process (creating the primary-but-crucial filtration layer). As of this writing, the project has raised more than $35,000 through Kickstarter with eight more days to go, so there’s still time to invest. Eventually the team hopes to pass their tests, win approval from the city, and build it by 2012.