The Springboard in the Pond

An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool

by Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen

MIT Press, 330 pp., $35 (paper)

“The pool is very much a challenge when it comes to interpretation,” van Leeuwen writes in the introduction to this exhaustively probing and often funny history of “this unpretentious hole in the ground.” While rereading modern architecture and asserting the necessity of including the swimming pool in any analysis of modernism, the author questions why we’ve been driven to build swimming pools, how we use them, and most fundamentally, why we swim. Our relationship with water is the very definition of ambivalence, van Leeuwen declares, and the swimming pool serves as a sort of template that illuminates deep fears and frustrations, as well as our fascination with, water. A study of water encompasses “just about everything,” the author acknowledges, so it’s admirable that The Springboard in the Pond mimics a swimming pool’s simplicity: No matter how far out you want to wade, you’re enclosed, with “no room for confusion, bombast, or contrivedness.”

This article appears in May 26 • 2000.

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