+POOL may come to Brooklyn Bridge Park, scores a big-name backer
Renderings by PlayLab, courtesy of +POOL.
Seven years ago the team behind +POOL floated the fanciful–but completely fun–sounding idea of building a pool submerged in NYC’s East River that would filter the polluted waterway in addition to being a cool-off spot for New Yorkers. Curbed reports that though the official line is that all options are still being looked at, project designers hope the city will allow +POOL to be located off a pier at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Since the idea’s introduction, the team behind +POOL–including Oana Stanescu, Dong-Ping Wong, and Cass Nakashima of Family NY, Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeff Franklin of Playlab–has been working towards making the aquatic project a reality. They’ve completed two successful Kickstarter campaigns to raise funds and conducted feasibility studies, but to date details on their progress have been few and far between.
Curbed now reports that the +POOL team has partnered with the Heineken-sponsored “The Cities Project,” which will follow 100,000 pledges on a new site, SwimInTheRiver.com, with a $100,000 donation. The site was launched on Earth Day and is hoping to reach its goal by summer’s end. In August, Heineken will provide support to underwrite the public artwork +POOL is programming for an as-yet-determined New York City river in the form of a light installation scaled to the size of the future pool. The installation is meant to provide a visible representation of how +POOL will be able to transform the waterfront.
The floating pool project team has also turned to Joshua David, co-founder of the High Line, to help make it become a reality. Says David, “One of the things that was appealing to me was that [+POOL] is not the High Line. I talk to a lot of people who want to put parks on bridges and on top of anything they can put a park on or underneath. But this was something… that was a seemingly virtually impossible way of experiencing the urban condition that is attached to history.”
The Tribeca Film Festival team is another partner who has created a documentary the +POOL team’s efforts: A short promo video about the project will air before each film screened at this year’s festival.
[Via Curbed]
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