The city of New York will soon begin testing the installation of the +Pool floating pool, a project that had been illustrated in detail to Domus by its cocreator Dong-Ping Wong.
The project has received a total of $16 million in funding. +Pool is a cross-shaped pool that will filter pollutants from the surrounding water without the use of chemicals, offering New Yorkers the opportunity to swim publicly. Following the stated timeline, the team hopes to complete the project as a free and accessible public pool by next year.
The idea of water as public space is still kind of new in the city, but it’s much more prevalent that it was just a few years ago (Dong Ping-Wong)
The module will be built in the city’s canals as a pilot project, with plans to possibly replicate the micro architecture and reuse it in other areas of New York State in the future, with renderings depicting it floating in waterways in Buffalo, Newburgh, Rochester and other locations.
According to the team, the full-sized +Pool will be able to clean 1,000,000 gallons of water per day by filtering water through its walls without chemicals or additives. The patented filtration system created by Friends of + POOL, would bring the river water to an acceptable microbiological standard for bathing using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) water quality modeling software.
In fact, the floating, self-filtering system has already undergone a series of test phases in 2011 in New York's East River, after an initial fundraiser launched on kickstarter.
In 2013, the second kickstarter campaign raised more than $300,000. A scale version of the filtration system in the Hudson River was thus funded and tested for six months in the summer of 2014. Contributors included Brooklyn-based Persak & Wurmfeld naval architects, Olollo manufacturers, Mackworth fabric and filtration system specialists, the River Project marine science station, scientists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and engineers from Arup.