World’s First ‘Floating’ Swimming Pool To Soon Open In London
Image via Embassy Gardens
Come Spring 2021, a prestigious neighborhood in London’s Nine Elms and Vauxhall will welcome the world’s first “floating” swimming pool, something it describes as “a world’s first in engineering.”
The Sky Pool at the swanky Embassy Gardens “floats” because it is transparent and suspended 115 feet above London. The 25-meter (82-foot) structure, holding 148,000 liters of water, will serve as a bridge between two residential buildings at the 10th story and offer swimmers sweeping views of central London.
The idea for the Sky Pool stemmed in 2013, when the team at developer Ballymore got together to discuss the property’s outdoor swimming pool and were contemplating where it could be fitted.
“We decided the only space large enough was between the buildings,” explained Tristan Stout, Ballymore’s Senior Development Manager. The developers soon decided that “the pool should be a sky pool, something transparent so that swimmers could see the ground and people below could see the sky.”
Instead of glass, the exclusive swimming pool is constructed from acrylic. Embassy Gardens enlisted Eckersley O’Callaghan, the company behind the structural glass for Apple Stores around the world, who explored “structures with enormous hydrostatic pressures” and found it the ideal material for the project. “It was acrylic, not glass, that had the potential to deal with big loads in critical situations,” said Brian Eckersley.
As such, the Sky Pool has also become “the largest single piece of load bearing acrylic in the world,” according to Embassy Gardens.
The pool was supposed to be ready this summer, but plans were halted due to the coronavirus. The developers now project for it to open next spring.
They updated on Instagram back in September, “The much-anticipated Sky Pool has been lifted into place at Embassy Gardens today, by one of the largest mobile cranes in the world. The crane has a load capacity of 750 tons.”
Each of the two buildings will also be topped with a sky deck, where residents can relax at a spa, summer bar or orangery.
In addition, the developers confirmed that the acrylic body has “undergone rigorous hydrostatic testing [with] safety factors 20 times more extensive than what would be carried out on a typical pedestrian or road bridge structure.”
When complete, members of Embassy Gardens’ exclusive Eg:le Club will be able to swim from building to building through the 3.2-meter (10 foot six inch) pool. The structure will be fixed with five lighting modes “to add to the feeling of magic,” Embassy Gardens noted.
“There are other examples of swimming pools [with] aqueducts connecting two buildings, like Marina Bay Sands in Singapore,” described Eckersley. “But there’s never been something transparent spanning two buildings like this. Once you swim off, you can look right down. It will be like flying.”
Image via Embassy Gardens
Image via Embassy Gardens
Image via Embassy Gardens
Image via Embassy Gardens
[via Bored Panda, images via Embassy Gardens]
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