Swimming in rivers is great, because you never know when eels/leeches/abandoned boots are going to wrap themselves around your ankle and suck you to your death. And swimming in pools is also great, because there’s a ton of kid-pee and stinky chlorine that fades your awesome hair dye really fast. So combining the two is a doozy of an idea that is totally worth a quarter of a million dollars! Who’s with me, New York City?!
Obviously I’m joking, but the designers of the + Pool, so named for its Red Cross plus-sign shape, are not. They’ve already raised nearly $138,000 on Kickstarter for the pool, which they describe as a huge strainer dropped into the East River, which would give Big Apple residents a chance to swim in non-disgusting water. Inhabitat has the deets on how the pool would work (no nostalgic chorine smell after all):
+ Pool is no ordinary pool … The idea is that rather than just being a concrete structure filled with chlorinated water, the pool walls would suck in river water through a layered filtration system that incrementally removes bacteria and contaminants. The design team says that the pool would be able to clean up to half a million gallons of river water every single day, and their current Kickstarter campaign is specifically aimed towards raising $250,000 to build an actual floating mock up of the + Pool in the East River this summer to test its filtration system.
I was having an easy time hating the idea until I watched the Kickstarter video. “For a city surrounded by water … it seemed a little bit ridiculous that you actually have to leave the city to swim in clean, natural, swimmable water,” Archie Lee Coates IV of PlayLab says earnestly in the vid. Hey, yeah! That does seem ridiculous! (Although you don’t absolutely have to leave the city. You could just swim in a dumpster.)
The project already has completed a first round of fundraising to test its filtration system, and netted the approval of city officials and entrepreneurs. It’s either pretty cool or an extravagant waste that helps cement the stereotype that New Yorkers are rich, self-involved, and stubbornly insistent that their city is way better than yours.
