Situated Freedom
The Private Swimming Pool Is So Much More Than Just Blue
Katja Hogenboom
Diving into the pool of Villa dall’Ava by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (1991) and swimming towards the Eiffel Tower is a delight. In the lit-up, bright blue pool of the photograph, we recognize the image of the archetypical blue pool with a woman in the foreground about to dive in and a man standing in the background, both seeming ready to indulge in the good life (fig 1.). The Villa plays with the commercial dreamscape of the pool, but is its amorous drive not unfolding another story, something that might turn this idea upside down?
(Fig. 1) Pool in the roof of Villa dall’Ava (1991), St. Cloud, Paris, France, by OMA. Photograph by Peter Aaron (OTTO).
(Fig. 2) Book cover: Reyner Banham Los Angeles the Architecture of Four Ecologies with the painting The Bigger Splash (1976) by David Hockney. Photograph of book by author.
On closer inspection, we see another story unfolding: while being drawn into the dream image, a subversion of the idea of the popular and the iconic imagery of the blue pool occurs. The enjoyment of the bigger splash, as in Hockney’s painting (fig 2.), will not happen, as we find that the woman cannot dive into the pool from the position where she is standing without hitting her head against the opposite wall of this narrow pool. The dream is shattered! The elements in the photograph of the pool are a play with and subversion of known iconographic elements (the luxurious blue pool, a view of an urban icon, pleasure around the pool). It turns out that this is not a pool to carelessly enjoy. It expresses both joy and the impossibility of the enjoyment of a pool (while it can of course be used, one can always dive in from the short end, and it is possible to swim a lap or more).
In this iconic image a contradictory story unfolds, one that I would like to unpack using the concept of situated freedom. My aim is to offer insight into the possible situated freedoms present within an archetypical, commodified image and experience of a private pool. Here, I ask how, within the lifeworld of private domesticity, freedom can be situated through architecture’s own zone of competences; architecture’s programmatic layout, materiality, structure, details, tectonics, and image which together create meaning and experience. I will specifically look at two pools: the pool in the roof of Villa dall’Ava by Koolhaas/OMA and the pool in nature at Maison à Bordeaux by Philippe Roussille in collaboration with Koolhaas/OMA (2004) to explore what kind of freedom, or unfreedom or even false freedoms they enable – facing the promise of happiness, gender norms and behavior, and commodification – and how architecture plays a role in this.
The Archetypical Private Pool
The private swimming pool is a very specific figure, and very much related to an idea of freedom, from free-floating in the water, to holiday – free - time where work is adjourned. In imagery, the aesthetics of the pool is often characterized by oceanic blue and green colors and clear blue skies. David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash (1967) is a clear example of this tendency (fig. 2). For Reyner Banham, who used the image on the cover of his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, it expresses the “dream of the good life.”[1] According to Iñaki Ábalos, by being placed on the cover of Banham’s book, this painting would become understood as an absolute manifesto of the good life in architecture, representing a way of thinking, building, and inhabiting space, that, although originally American, was universal.[2]
(Fig. 3) ArchDaily pool. Print-screen by author of the daily email from ArchDaily featuring a swimming pool.
This expression of the good life is also reflected in the proliferation of architectural imagery of blue pools in luxurious settings in magazines, websites, and newsletters such as Archdaily, Architizer, Wallpaper, and Abitare (fig. 3). To this can be added the imagery in advertisements, movies, and publications, all of which has produced an archetypical ideal of the blue swimming pool as a promise of individual fulfilment. Having a pool is seen to provide and represent happiness; it is a place to combat stress, misery, and illness, replacing these things with relaxation, happiness, and wellness. Happiness is an important part of the middle-class dream of the good life. Whereas previously, “the good life” referred to living a religious good life (i.e., following the rules of religion), today the idea is that of a pleasurable life, a hedonistic life, which, in Western culture, is associated with enjoying recreational pleasures such as good food; good wine; sports like skiing, scuba diving, etc.; and lounging by the pool in the sun with a cocktail.
Although pools come in different forms and shapes, it is the rectangular, turquoise-blue pool—pictured under a blue sky and populated by young, healthy, happy, and politically correct (in terms of gender norms) bodies—that remains the most common. But is this freedom, or are we forced into a very specific and limited way of understanding what it means having a pool? Forcing us in all kinds of normative gender specific roles, and understanding of what should make us feel happy, is this freedom or in fact a false freedom or a false promise of happiness?
The Promise of Happiness
Today there is an entire industry devoted to happiness, so called “the happiness industry,” in which design plays an essential role in strategically channeling the hopes and wishes of people in their quest for happiness in objective, measurable, and administrative ways. Scientific studies of happiness are on the increase and such studies are becoming interdisciplinary. Claims about minds, brains, bodies, and economic activity morph into one another, without challenging underlying presumptions of what happiness is. These claims express an impossible wish for an exit from consumerism and egocentricity, towards what happiness gurus sense many people are seeking: identity, health, youth, mindfulness, empathy, and an escape from stress. Through the happiness industry, happiness is co-opted to maximize profits; corporations like Google employ Chief Happiness Officers to ensure their employees’ happiness, thus ensuring their productivity. Within this idea, or industry, of happiness, a complicated entanglement of free-time, leisure, hope, and enjoyment becomes situated within infrastructures of individual comfort, security, and measurement, control, and efficiency.
In her book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed refers to a future of happiness that directs the choices we make today. She scrutinizes the oft-uttered phrase “I just want you to be happy” in order to understand what this in fact demands, from and for whom. Referring to the proliferation of happiness studies in the last decade, the so called “happiness turn,” she identifies a consensus around the term “happiness,” its use, and its (objective) measurement which involve an evaluation of better and worse kinds of happiness, which is problematic as “hierarchies of happiness,” she writes, “may correspond to social hierarchies that are already given.”[3] It is precisely these hierarchies and the underlying distribution of who can, and should be, happy, and in what ways, that is at stake in her work. She questions the connection of happiness to good/pleasurable/positive feelings. By opening up the debate around happiness, including addressing unhappiness, she questions the demand to “just be happy.” She explores the freedom to be unhappy, and through this the freedom to be happy in inappropriate ways; in this, she looks at ways to break the happiness quest and open “to a world where things can happen in alternative ways.” Such freedom, she writes, attempts to make more room, to open a life, and to create room for possibility.
When connected to the idea of the private pool, the question is: is it possible to create room for possibility, for another freedom? What alternatives to the normative might be offered in relation to the good life, of healthy, happy, gender normative demands? Can the figure of the pool not enable a much more complex experience?
The Pool as a Complex Assemblage
As a space of leisure, which is full of dreams and desires, the private pool comes close to what Foucault defined as “heterotopia.”[4] In addition to the utopia of the good life, it is also a space where other dreams, desires, fantasies, and imaginations of play, togetherness, leisure, adventure, culture, fashion, picnicking, dining, voyeurism, the artificial, nature, the festival, and the holiday overlap. As an Other place, the pool is a space of both joy and fear, and of many more contradictions. It encompasses the healthy body and the failure to achieve this. It is overloaded with conventions that it cannot do without. These many overlapping and contradictory realities offer an image of a complex assemblage, rich with the plasticity of affects, gaps and openings, and possibilities to create another sense of freedom—one that engages the complex nature of the situation, not only affirming the status quo or purifying its consuming effects, but potentially enabling more meaningful and enriching experiences of life too: what I call situated freedom.
Situated Freedom refers to another idea of freedom, away from the hijacked concept of neoliberalist freedom of the market, individualism, and identity politics. Freedom is always dependent on an existing situation, dependent on a historical and present condition, or a particular situation, the existing power-knowledge relationship, and itself produces power. Power is both oppressive and productive, it is contingent, and never comes unmediated. Space is the container for freedom, and architecture is in this sense understood as a biopolitical discipline that spatializes power and subjectivation, but which is also able to rearticulate a given situation and provide it with a new configuration. It is however not a liberation from oppression. Situation Freedom indicates a space of possible transformation of capitalism’s competition-driven and ego-reliant individuals. It refers to an enabling freedom, an ethics of the possible. It is in creating room for engagement to occur that alternatives can be located, an expanding of a local situation, which is always relational.
The way you can achieve situated freedom in architecture, I argue, is through the field of aesthetics. Here aesthetics is not a question of beautification but of the sensible, how bodies and objects relate in the world. In line with Jacques Rancière aesthetics is understood as the effective medium through which things, objects, human and non-humans register the proximity of each other.[5] Deep attunement to objects, surface, space (events), material, tectonics is where the profession is at as political practice. Aesthetics has the capacity to produce experiences that can jolt us of out of complacency. In other words, the politics of architecture itself; how architecture through its own zone of competence can potentially contribute to situated freedom.
Let us continue unpacking the first pool at Villa dall’Ava to see what freedoms it might enable.
(Fig. 4) The house with the giraffe walking around. Photograph by Hans Werlemann, courtesy of OMA.
The Pool in the Roof of Villa dall’Ava
During the opening ceremony of Villa dall’Ava, Koolhaas and photographer Hans Werlemann made a film. Different scenes in the film, which were both filmed and photographed by Werlemann in and around the house, refer to “The Story of the Pool” depicted in Koolhaas’ book: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.[6] The film was never screened, nor have any photographs officially been published. Only a few photographs remain: one depicts a giraffe walking around the house (fig. 4), while another shows architects from the office OMA dressed up like the lifeguards from “The Story of the Pool,” doing warming-up exercises standing on the narrow boardwalk alongside the pool (fig. 5). These theatrically staged photographs indicate that the villa is seen as stage set, as different mise-en-scènes are set up in different parts of the house, telling different stories that refer to the narrative aspect of the house. These specific, plotted stories can only be fully understood by “insiders”: those who know The Story of the Pool and have some background information about the architect. However, there remains a lot to identify for those that are not insiders to the architectural discourse.
(Fig. 5) The architect-lifeguards (collaborators at the OMA office) alongside the pool of Villa dall’Ava. Photograph by Hans Werlemann, courtesy of OMA.
(Fig. 6) The Arrival of the Pool by Madelon Vriesendorp. Image courtesy of OMA.
Such as in the case in the photograph by Peter Aaron, which is always used by Koolhaas/OMA to represent the project online and in publications (fig. 1). This image shows the lit-up, clear-blue pool at night, with a swimmer about to dive into it and the Eiffel Tower in the background. In addition to the incredible likeness that it maintains with Madelon Vriesendorp’s painting (fig. 6), which was used as the cover of “The Story of the Pool,” this photograph also offers a semiotic play of references characterized by a specific kind of narrative in relation to the archetypical pool, teasing out a play on the good life – as stipulated in the first paragraph of this essay – that most of its audiences will almost immediately understand and follow.
Intellectual Montage
Many have written about the narrative dimension in the work of Koolhaas, for instance Roberto Gargiani (Rem Koolhaas – OMA The Construction of Merveilles), who suggest that we can compare the linking of scenes in Villa dall’Ava to the surrealistic device of the exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis).[7] It is relevant to briefly investigate this reading, and to address the fact that it is a formal reading that fails to consider the overall meaning being produced. The exquisite corpse is a collage method that juxtaposes very different parts without any one part referring to the others. It is thus a random collection that forms a whole, in which the parts, at first, are not related and do not respond to each other. According to Gargiani this manner of juxtaposition becomes visible in the way the program is translated into different elements in the Villa dall’Ava: stone podium, glass house, reinforced concrete wall, metal boxes, and suspended pool. The reference to the exquisite corpse is however in my view an understandable misconception of the typologically fragmented character of the villa. The different parts of the house, as Gargiani indicates, are clearly visible as separate elements and are seemingly randomly juxtaposed. However, these elements—which seem all very deliberate and carefully chosen as clear references or quotations—stand in a purposeful relation to each other and should not be interpreted as separate “parts” but must rather be understood as a different kind of whole. While formally, the villa is the opposite of a single whole, continuity is experienced in how things come together and relate in a continuous scenario—a trajectory of journeys—of different stage sets, which produce juxtapositions that are not continuous in their morphology but rather operate as a string of scenes, more filmic. Montaged together, these scenes form a plot: they create a narrative movement from room to room in multiple directions. The narrative plays out in multiple senses, as an expression of the multiplicity of life. These scenes do not formally constitute a whole; they form a consistent narrative. You arrive at the site, walk to the door, start at the beginning, and experience a possible start, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order: this is not a linear story of (Hollywood) happiness. The exquisite corpse method of collage, of interrelated separate parts, does not seem to work as analogy for the way the scenes in the Villa dall’Ava form a whole.
An alternative method wherein overlap and nearness are more deliberately acted out is montage. This method, as it has been used in film, and specifically in the dialectic work of Eisenstein and later Godard, comes closer to describing how the villa works. The plot of life is experienced as a filmic montage, so that in the movement between spaces, the transitions between stage sets, the collisions of different elements—as Deleuze explains in relation to Eisenstein’s method of intellectual montage— are dialectically linked through shock, exposing society’s true workings in the face of which the spectator makes associations that are based on intellectual meaning.[8] The montage is the intellectual process itself, Deleuze writes, which moves from image to thought.
In Villa dall’Ava an intellectual montage of dialectical narratives plots out a specific choreography of living. Through three dialectical narrations—“Construction Site,” “On the Edge,” and “A Backstage Trajectory”—different spatial sequences and fragmented scenes take place on the way to the rooftop pool. These different scenes, which trace a trajectory through the house, reveal a specific, subversive character in the architecture.
Construction Site
(Fig. 7) The villa, which was designed for the family of three (the two parents and their daughter), is 250 square meters and stands in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, in a garden of 650 square meters; it is surrounded by nineteenth-century villas. Print-screen from Google Earth.
The roof garden and its pool are ambiguous, exposed as they are to its suburban surroundings and thus quite unlike a private backyard garden (fig. 7). When getting in or out of the pool or being around the pool, one is specifically exposed to neighbors and the street. Also, the materials, despite the grass on one of the roofs, flirt with and derive from the urban environment. The swimmer is captured in a concrete box. Quite often pools are concrete boxes, but then every attempt is made to fit these boxes into a landscape, to appease their surroundings and reinforce their connection to the home, usually oozing an atmosphere of privacy and intimacy in the process. Here, no attempt has been made to hide the concrete of the box: it remains visible and presents itself in and around the house. No private or intimate spaces surround the pool either. Instead, all kinds of disturbances, including the possible voyeurism of the neighbors and interruptions from the street, are allowed in (fig. 8). Once submerged in the pool, one might feel more protected from views, but even then, an underwater porthole on the side of the parent’s unit allows someone to gaze up into the underwater space from the inside of the house.
(Fig. 8) The long, narrow plot and the house is, like in many of OMA’s projects, is arranged in bands. The plot is divided into three bands, lengthwise: in the middle is the villa, to its left is the garden, and to its right is the paved entrance to the garage. The villa is divided into three bands as well, which run perpendicular to the bands of the plot: the parents’ apartment occupies the garden side, the daughter’s apartment is on the street side, and the pool sits in-between it all, a meeting point that connects the two private “boxes” of the parents’ and daughter’s apartments with the shared kitchen and living space below. Photograph by Hans Werlemann, courtesy of OMA.
It is also not like a rooftop pool with amazing view over the city scape, even though it has the view to the Eiffel tower. It is an entanglement with metropolitan life at a distance and the surrounding neighbors and street, with the almost naked swimmer exposed to their surroundings. This can be understood as a play with the context of the private pool in the backyard garden, instead of which we are offered an urban pool on the roof, lacking privacy and intimacy. Standing on the roof, especially at night, with a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower and the blue, lit-up pool in the foreground could offer an idea of urban decadence (fig. 9). Swimming towards the Eiffel Tower is an expression of this, but the lane ends in a construction site: a grass field surrounded by an orange construction fence. The luxury statement is there, and then it is subverted.
(Fig. 9) The pool is a long, skewed strip of blue water sunken in the roof between the two boxes, hence the pool in the roof. Due to zoning regulations, the long walls of the house are not parallel. This enhances an effect that exaggerates the length of the building when viewed from one side and shortens it when viewed from the other side. Photograph by Hans Werlemann, courtesy of OMA.
The constant reminder of voyeurism and of the metropolis influences the behavior of the subject taking a swim. It places the subject under surveillance, playfully, and instead of the privacy of total immersion or the hypnosis of the dream of the backyard pool, the swimmer is offered exposure, almost to the quasi extreme (even once underwater, this occurs through the porthole). There is no escape, which induces a very self-aware feeling in the swimmer. There exist contradictions in the pool’s connection to the site, which is both private and public, luxurious, abstract, and an urban construction site, all of which is in constant dialectical interplay. The popular reference to the blue pool is repurposed, which opens the question of what the luxurious villa with a private backyard pool might be really about.
On the Edge
(Fig. 10) The pool is 12 meters long and 3 meters wide, decreasing to 2 meters at its narrow side. The pool can be reached by stairs from the open-air, first floor balcony between the parents’ unit and their daughter’s unit. Access to the pool is via a straight aluminum ladder from the upper roof or from a narrow wooden boardwalk that connects one side of the pool to the lower roof. Still from the documentary Arte Baukunst in conversation with Rem Koolhaas in 1995. Print-screen by author.
In addition to the lack of protection from voyeurism there is also literally a lack of protection offered around the pool. When standing on the roof, only a nearly visible and not too sturdy fencing protects you from falling; when climbing the stairs, the roof edge is directly ahead of you and without any warning you suddenly find yourself standing on the edge of the roof, with the garden about ten meters below (fig. 10). The balancing act of getting into the pool is no less edgy. Stepping onto the horizontal aluminum ladder, one must make a 180-degree turn and step through the two poles sticking up above the roof, while holding on to one of them. The railing does not bend, offering easy access, as standard pool ladders do. On the steep ladder, one has the option to go down into the pool or make a sidestep onto the wooden boardwalk (fig. 11). The narrow boardwalk, with the terrace/balcony over three meters down, has no railing or fencing, and does not offer any protection. At the other edge of the pool, the concrete wall extends eight meters straight down to the garden (fig. 12).
Left image (fig. 11): The pool is 12 meters long and 3 meters wide, decreasing to 2 meters at its narrow side. The pool can be reached by stairs from the open-air, first floor balcony between the parents’ unit and their daughter’s unit. Access to the pool is via a straight aluminum ladder from the upper roof or from a narrow wooden boardwalk that connects one side of the pool to the lower roof. Still from the documentary Arte Baukunst in conversation with Rem Koolhaas in 1995. Print-screen by author.
Right image (fig. 12): Still from the documentary Arte Baukunst in conversation with Rem Koolhaas in 1995. Print-screen by author.
(Fig. 13) "All protection eliminated." Comments by Koolhaas on working drawings of Villa dall’Ava. Photograph of book by author.
These edgy conditions are a deliberate act, as is clearly shown on the working drawings of Villa dall’Ava. The drawings published in book S, M, L, XL show all fences around the roof crossed out with red pencil. Correction notes by Koolhaas remark “all protection eliminated” (fig. 13).[9] The roof has minimal fencing, as desired by Koolhaas, comprising of an oval, orange building site safety net on the lower roof and a similar, oval-shaped, black fence on the higher roof. However, there is no fencing at all along the pool’s boardwalk/bridge connecting to the lower roof. While in and around the pool, it is impossible to become immersed in a total experience of enjoyment. It is possible to swim and do your exercise, but vertigo will always accompany you when getting in and out of the pool, as one becomes aware of the dangers of falling, of living on the edge. Breaking the illusion of the happy life activates awareness; and activates the one using the pool.
This is similar to the actor on the Brechtian stage who through the Gestus method breaks the illusion on the stage. “Gestus” was a mode of acting used in Brecht’s Epic theatre. Contrary to “method acting,” in which the actor aspires to become the character s/he plays by drawing on experience to submerge him/herself emotionally within the role, using the Gestus method the actor instead reveals the “fakeness” of the situation and its motivations. This creative act allows two or more realities to appear at once (that of the actor, who is never able to forget him/herself, and that of the character s/he plays), while the staging of the mise-en-scène becomes visible, allowing the audience to look behind the stage.
The Gestus method intends to show the causality of behavior, making visible social relations and constructions while ensuring that these two or more realities (between the real and the fictional) never fully overlap. This is done with the intention to prevent the audience from becoming absorbed or hypnotized, instead encouraging them to think critically and participate, to question and perceive what appears on stage in an active and reflective way. When plausible conventions are desynchronized, alternative routes appear. In addition to the activation of the audience, Brecht also sought to divide them “rather than fabricate a mythical social unity through a façade of populist togetherness.”[10] Brecht preferred to confront the audience with its own contradictions and, by leaving those contradictions unresolved, disavow the image of the audience as one united public.[11]
In and around the pool in the roof, there is a constant sliding in and out of character, in one moment one can enjoy a swim in the nice blue water; in the next, one is exposed and put in danger when getting in, out, or being around the pool. It never settles, revealing the “fakeness” of the situation, and activates the audience to reflect and participate; to question what a private pool is about.
A Backstage Trajectory
(Fig. 14) Pull-down ladder used to go up from the garden to the first floor, the roof, and the pool. Still from the documentary Arte Baukunst in conversation with Rem Koolhaas in 1995. Print-screen by author.
In the route through the house towards the pool, instead of a grand entrance or display of wealth (for example, large glass sliding doors that open onto a terrace with a magnificent pool), we are instead led along what I refer to as a “backstage trajectory.” To be able to reach the pool on the roof, one not only has to know the route to the pool, which is quite hidden, but the trajectory of open-air stairs and steep steel ladders going up to the roof does not serve up the pool of “the good life.” The trajectory to the pool consists of a sequence of movements from an aluminum ladder and stairs, through a back pathway, by a peek-hole, and it is as if one is moving through the constructed back of a stage set, in-between the different scenes, moving up or down via a series of fragile “scaffoldings,” such as fire escape ladders (fig. 14). The rough and temporary aesthetics – cheap materials – express a self-inflicted desire to stand on its own as design.
(Fig. 15) Backdoor aesthetics. Still from the documentary Arte Baukunst in conversation with Rem Koolhaas in 1995. Print-screen by author.
The trajectory to the pool from the ground-floor garden demands scaling a pull-down fire escape ladder, after which one continues from the first floor to the roof using a fixed aluminum ladder, both of which have minimal railings. Approaching from one of the bedroom units, one comes out of steel-clad door, passing the unfinished concrete side of the pool. This corner looks more like a back door in an industrial area, or the back door to a club for secret smoking (fig. 15). Making the backstage visible. In the villa, the backstage scaffolding not only subverts the luxurious private villa, but it also prevents the act of living from becoming caught in the dream of the perfect good life. By a narration that engages and feeds on popular culture through everyday references and quotations that acknowledge the signs and imagination of the pool as an attribute of the good life, an attempt is simultaneously made to transform that imagination. Through the way in which this pool frames life, it breaks things open, letting one experience the contradictory fictions that permeate reality. It is a semiotic method that is using these images and plays them off against each other, staging contradictions in a deconstructive fashion.
Here we come across an approach—an aesthetic practice—that embraces the immediacy and contradictions of contemporary life, and while it cannot exist without a relation to clichés it also takes a stance in (op)position to that life. It shows that meaning is produced and mediated through and by the architectural syntax itself. It is this crisis in relation to a situation (i.e., dissensus) that allows for a method of invention, whereby the unforeseen and accidental are included as crucial parts of an aesthetic method that transforms and emancipates local (territorial) norms, revealing contradictions from within.
Before further analyzing what this mode of engagement offers, a question which I return to in the concluding observation of this text, I will focus on the pool in nature, at the Maison à Bordeaux, and its modes of engagement with the commodified imaginary of the archetypical blue pool.
The Pool in Nature at Maison à Bordeaux
(Fig. 16) The reflective surface of the Pool in nature merges with the nature surrounding it. Photograph by Philippe Roussille.
The pool in nature is located within walking distance of the Maison à Bordeaux (1998, Koolhaas/OMA); the surrounding landscape is captured in multiple reflections that cross the pool’s surface (fig. 16). At first sight, in fact, the pool in nature seems to be all about lived experience and its natural landscape setting, and to be lacking all references to style or design. The swimming water is kept in place—caught in an almost invisible, long, and narrow frame, it cuts through, and seemingly hovers above, the landscape. As an abstract, linear, reflecting surface, an incision of minimal intervention, the pool seems alien; in response, an inviting nature appears. It is as if one lane of an Olympic swimming pool—a disciplinary figure—has been cut into the landscape. Whilst it is aligned at one end, the pool sticks out like a Miesian bench at its other end. The water is sometimes dark and sometimes reflective, its surface refusing to reference the blue, abstract artificiality of the swimming pool. Only its linearity reminds you of its rigorous rationality.
Unlike the aesthetic techniques deployed in the design of the first pool, the pool of the Maison à Bordeaux does not montage different realities in juxtaposition. It does not appear formally hybrid.
The Pool in Nature
Like the Maison à Bordeaux, the pool—which, in contrast to the widely published house, is largely unanalyzed—also sits on a hilltop, sharing the view towards Bordeaux and the river Garonne; it occupies a grass field surrounded by bushes and trees (figs. 17 and 18). Together with OMA, Philippe Roussille developed what the design team called “an architectural object”: a “monolith of water.”[12] This architectural object was only possible thanks to recent technical innovations like the underground filtration system, which allowed for the simplification of the original design, which depended on aquatic plants for filtration.
(Fig. 17, left) The reflective surface of the Pool in nature merges with the nature surrounding it. Photograph by Philippe Roussille.
(Fig. 18, right) The pool in Nature on the hilltop with a view towards Bordeaux and the river Garonne. Print screen from Google Earth.
The pool has a long, rectangular shape (it is 2.5 meters wide, 25 meters long, and 1.5 meters deep) and is made of reinforced concrete. The site is naturally undulating, and the pool is elevated 50 centimeters above the ground at one end and is flush with the ground at the other (fig. 19). Water overflows the 25-centimeter lip on each of the four concrete edges. The edges are overgrown with moss, making the light grey concrete darken. The water falls onto a narrow strip of pebbles along the four sides of the pool. The pebbles appear natural and are the only hint of an entire underground system of biological filtration that keeps the water natural, clear, and healthy. As essential and relevant as it is, a technical analysis of the machinery that allows the pool to aesthetically appear as a minimal and performative form does not, however, help us to understand and read this “object”.
(Fig. 19) The pool is elevated at one end, laying flush with the grass field at the opposite end.
Photograph by Philippe Roussille.
Non-Object
The pool in nature’s overflowing concrete edges, which literally spill over, disappear through the reflection of the water surface, which in multiplying its surroundings makes them also “spill over,” in turn extending the pool beyond its own limits (fig. 20). Based on the photographs I have seen of the pool, I can image how these multiple refractions and reflections of the surface of the pool remain ambiguous and are redefined again and again through experience; they depend on what you are doing and where you are—if you are approaching the pool, or swimming in the pool, in parallel or laterally. This is also dependent on the weather conditions, the amount of light, day or night, amount of wind, and if it rains. This pool is about swimming, the act of movement in water itself and of getting into that water. Meaning is not represented—not set in advance—but appears.
(Fig. 20) The reflections of the surface extend the pool in nature beyond its own limits. Photograph by Philippe Roussille.
When you are swimming, the mirrored surface breaks and is activated; this transforms the long strip, even beyond its on limits. This concerns an idea of the object beyond itself. This pool does not make a lot of fuss about itself (it is not “self-referential”). The assemblage that it constitutes is not focused on the object of the pool itself but on experiences of the pool and the relations that it creates. This resonates with the idea of the non-object in art that I will briefly discuss here, as developed by the Brazilian poet and critic Ferreira Gullar[13] The non-object is not the opposite of a material object—instead, it refers to an object in which meaning develops through sensory and mental experiences: The non-object is experienced, it is inherently relational, it demands the act of participation with its viewers, and for this reason it differs from an autonomous or self-referential object. The idea of the “non-object,” with its focus on experience, aims to resist signification and thus the possibility of commodification of the object. According to Mónica Amor, the non-object would thus be liberated from “any signification outside the event of its own apparition.”[14]
Perhaps we could say that in the pool in nature, signification and meaning occur through the experience of the pool. The specific kind of objecthood is created through the experience of its appearance—sometimes it disappears by mirroring the surrounding nature, and sometimes it spills over into what surrounds it, or at times it distances itself from its surroundings by appearing as a black strip cut out in the hill—which allows, through an act of participation, for it to engage its viewers. The idea of “experiencing through”—like John Cage’s concept of hearing through, offers an analogy which can shed light on the experiencing of freedom from the normative and the commodity that the pool of nature might offer.
Cage’s most famous work, 4’33” (1952), the 4,5 min silence orchestrated as a concert, is according to him a sonic manifesto through which he defines “silence” not as the complete absence of sound but instead as the presence of an “ambient and unintentional noise” that can be heard through the music. The silent moments in music, according to Cage, open up for the sounds of the world, an idea that he compares to the openness and reflections present in the glass architecture of Mies van der Rohe. Cage writes that the reflections that glass houses produce, which present “to the eye images of clouds, trees, or grass, according to the situation,” demonstrate that “There is no such thing as an empty space of an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.”[15]
The pool in nature can thus be read as a device, a non-object that enables an experience which allows us to start to see beyond that which is represented.
The idea of experiencing through the object – Cage argues – offers an alternative to serialized and conformist modes of behavior. This is a mode of perception in which attention is unfocused and any attachment to pre-exiting models can be undermined. Cage’s aesthetics is neither meant to understand nor to oppose logics of social formation but to “forget” that they were even there. Serialized modes of behavior resulted from the logic of modern existence. As Cage saw it, the logic of modern existence had everything to do with repetition (not with the chaos of everyday modern life); what he saw in this logic was a system of capitalist mass production disguised as personalization. Instead of being offered real differences, the individual was presented with serial differentiation, “accommodating people into the realm of commodity production.”[16]
Similar to the serialized differentiation of outdoor private pools, which offer nothing other than sameness disguised as difference. In response to this repetition, Cage searched for an unregulated difference, a differentiation opposed to the serialized logic of the commodity. The undifferentiated, like unregulated difference, aims at remaining ambiguous: it is that for which no mental image exists, and the experience or perception of it opens for nonconformist behaviors. Cage attempted to go beyond capitalism. The pool in nature, however, does not negate or oppose the commodity of the private pool, I argue, but aims to offer an alternative experience that has nothing to do with critique, perhaps just as the first pool does by using cliché images of the pool and subverting them. The pool in nature disappears as an object (it is thus a “non-object”) through its undifferentiated reflections, blurring the line between the object and its surroundings, which, in its “amnesia” forgets and thus removes the archetypical image of the pool. The pool opens up journeys of potential possibility and opportunities to see and wonder what an open event can do, thereby opening up perception to nonconformist behaviors.
(Fig. 21) The pool in nature with people surrounding it in the field of the pool and nature. Photograph by Philippe Roussille.
We can observe such a nonconformist behavior in one of the rare photographs of the pool in nature that includes people (fig. 21). The photograph shows a group of at least 3 perhaps 4 people gathered around, and swimming in, the pool; at least one person is sitting next to the pool on a (seemingly randomly) stacked pile of stones, and two people are in the pool, almost entirely submerged in the water. The figures in the image are almost imperceptible—the surface of the water, the grass and the trees surrounding it are more prominent. This scene is not about a group of people hanging around the pool, exposed bodies bathing in sunlight or sitting in contemplation with dangling feet in the water, having a drink; this is not a party or a BBQ. No one fearlessly and elegantly dives from the edge or from a springboard. No one playfully bounces a ball around, and not even bodily exercise is celebrated. It is as if – and here I am fabulating – the people in the image are having a picnic, perhaps talking, maybe just pausing after or just before a swim, or perhaps only cooling down in the water. This scene remains ambiguous.
This is not the archetypical scene, but something different: the scene perhaps expresses an idea of openness with respect to the possibility to engage with and enjoy the pool in a different manner. The people in this scene are not playing parts in an intended figure of representation: this image does not focus on who the people are, their gender, or what it is exactly that they are doing. Nor is it about their relation to nature. One could argue that the pool does not script behavior or perpetuate habits of inhabitation. Also, similar to the active participation in listening that is required of the audience in John Cage’s piece 4’33, in which sounds are heard through the music, the water bar transforms into a swimming pool, and the relations that it maintains in relation to the surrounding nature emerge and are transformed in the act of swimming.
Submerged in the endless, fragmented, reflections created by the disturbance of the mirroring water surface, we perhaps encounter the “differentiation of an experience of multiplicitous perception of the world” that Cage refers to, a liberation leading to “no matter what eventuality,” to an experiencing not yet known.
In the pool in nature imagery of the archetypical pool and its modes of production are supplemented and built on. This move offers a situated freedom for the subject occupying, using, and engaging with the pool, without relying on or providing the archetypical idea of happiness and the identity of the good life. This leaves visitors who are turned into wanderers to enjoy the pool in another way: through experience, open for other ways of becoming. Confused by the experience, the subjects can wonder and wander around the pool on their own terms. The swimmer is invited not to identify but to think and make connections between different images of swimming or of being in and around a pool. Any sense of the self is loosened, it is a lesser concern, setting you free. Offering another image, away from the cliché or its opposite, the pool in nature offers not the image of the world as it is known, but the rebirth of another relation to the world as it makes itself appear.
To Conclude
Confronting the cliché of the archetypical imaginary of a private pool, the two pools addressed here offer a different mode of engagement and mediation—they experiment differently with inventing a form that challenges its entanglements with happiness, neoliberal ideas of individual freedom, and normative clichés. Both pools explores the role played by vision in constituting the human subject; in each case, the continuous reproduction of this subject is shown to occur by means of the social forms of visuality and in each case, architecture seeks to offer an alternative. These pools advance towards their users, disentangling them from habitual modes of aesthetic reception; each pool turns the attention of the user away from the archetypical image of the pool in order to turn it back on itself—or, more precisely, on the relationship of the user with the pool. Challenging the given situation from within, redefining the situation. This is what I refer to as situated freedom. The pools go beyond reality as found, engaging the situation of the archetypical pool; subverting, to open it up, and offer different types of freedom, possible situated freedom, in between the construction of meaning and the production of affect, by architecture. Producing meaning through narration, the experiential (use), and productive imaginary. In the exploration of these two pools – acknowledging that this exploration isn't an exhaustive examination of the possibilities of situated freedom – reveals inherent limitations, which I currently largely omit in this discussion. The primary focus here is to present a starting point for understanding the concept of situated freedom.[17] Specifically, how design within its own zone of competences (its form), can engage with an idea of freedom, and that openings can be enabled, by exploring the role of aesthetics in narrative and experiential possibilities.
Katja Hogenboom is an architect, educator (Academie of Architecture, Amsterdam), researcher (PhD KTH, Stockholm) based in Amsterdam. In her work she investigates architecture’s emancipating and sustainable potential in society, while considering the disciplinary expertise of the profession itself - its aesthetic experience.
[1] Reyner Banham, Los Angeles the Architecture of Four Ecologies (Fakenham, Norfork: Fakenham Press, 1982 [1971]), 238.
[2] Iñaki Ábalos, The Good Life, A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2001).
[3] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 12.
[4] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Architecture / Mouvement/Continuité (October 1984), https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf.
[5] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London, New York: Continuum, 2004).
[6] Rem Koolhaas, “The Story of the Pool” [1977], in Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), 307-311.
[7] Roberto Gargiani, Rem Koolhaas/ OMA The Construction of Merveilles (Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2008).
[8] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 158.
[9] Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995), 190.
[10] Robert Stam, Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 112.
[11] I am familiar with Jacques Rancière's criticism of Brecht's theatre model rooted in position-based inequality, as well as Theodor W. Adorno's skepticism regarding Brecht's didacticism, suggesting that his decisive influence undermined its basic political aims. I extend this critique to Villa dall'Ava, pinpointing its predetermined message and didacticism as limiting factors. I propose Deleuze's concept of "montrage" as an alternative, tracing an evolution in the practices of Koolhaas/OMA. In my view, this shift from a Brechtian approach to a Deleuzian thinking is crucial for comprehending the transformation within Koolhaas/OMA's practice concerning situated freedom, a subject I delve into in my doctoral thesis, Situated Freedom – Exploring the Aesthetic Practice of Rem Koolhaas/OMA (KTH Stockholm, 2023).
[12] See: Philippe Roussille, “2003 – Innovation importante: Création de la première piscine naturelle à lits filtrants enterrés,” 2003, accessed July, 2017, https://www.elodee.fr/ historique-et-parcours. Translation by Author.
[13] Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-Object,” Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005) http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/5392/1/08_Cosmo_Michael%2520v4%255b1%255d.pdf.
[14] Mónica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1969 (Oakland, Cal.: University of California Press, 2016).
[15] John Cage as cited in Branden W. Joseph, “The Architecture of Silence,” in Experimentations John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 87.
[16] Branden W. Joseph, “The Architecture of Silence,” in Experimentations John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture, 118.
[17] The Villa dall’Ava pool’s predetermined message forecloses actual experience, while the pool in nature possibly offers the greatest potential for new creation, the immersive experience might too easily avoid the complexity of meaning production. In my doctoral thesis I investigate other projects of OMA that reveal a movement from montage (Eisenstein and Brecht) to montrage (Gilles Deleuze); which is a move towards an open montrage of becoming that offers a necessary other engagement with its audiences towards Situated Freedom. See: Katja Hogenboom, Situated Freedom – Exploring the Aesthetic Practice of Rem Koolhaas/OMA (doctoral thesis, KTH Stockholm, 2023).
