Swimming Pool Complex in Portugal
Leire. Portugal
Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz
Collaborator
Victor Moita
Client
Ayuntamiento de Marinha Grande
Infographics
C_Factory – Luis Cuenca
We could say that the city is a place full of pooling (Empooling, Peter Smithson), of intermediate spaces that enable transitions between scales and uses, generating environments of great spatial and experiential richness. We imagine that the Marinha Grande swimming pool complex needs a device that reconciles it with its immediate surroundings—a pooling that facilitates an agreement with the public space and acts as a threshold to the building. The swimming pool building is thus understood as a space flooded by the park, allowing for the fluid movement of citizens. Beyond its reference to intermediate places, ‘Empooling’ evokes a flooded topography, a rocky shoreline where pools are naturally formed as water becomes trapped in elevated terrain. We could imagine the swimming pools as those natural cavities among rocks that appear filled with water when the tide recedes, their contours defined by their encounter with the stone. In the case of the swimming pools, this logic is reversed: the precise, Cartesian geometry of the competition basins contrasts with the fractured silhouette of the building—like a flooded rock that captures the water. Water, glass, and rock are like three states of the same material, intimately linked to Marinha Grande, a coastal city dedicated to glass production—three memories coexisting in this geography. The memory of water culture suggests spaces where light plays in endless sparkles. These sparkles could be solidified, frozen into glass that speckles the building’s surfaces. Molded glass pieces embedded in the concrete walls would shimmer in the sun, filtering both light and external gazes. The building’s stony, geological geometry on the outside would thus house a luminous, evanescent interior filled with water and light.
