The Brooklyn Rail

I’ve lived in New York for ten years and I’ve never swum in a public pool.

That will change after viewing Karolina Czeczek and Anna Morgowicz’s exhibition Public Pools at Citygroup downtown. The show takes a historic subject and animates it, using architectural imagination to show us how community really is rooted in design—and that we can activate existing spaces rather than always building, selling, and consuming new ones.

The Citygroup exhibition space is run as a collective, and shows in the slim sub-level space are often research-driven and activist—they ask how architecture can engage with meaningful change in the city. I walked into the architecture collective on a summer evening of oppressive humidity and heat hovering around 95 degrees. In Chinatown and the Lower East Side, heat is palpable, since development is dense and tree cover is scarce. I entered the gallery sweating, and saw Karolina Czeczek doing her best to manage the heat, seated at a desk sandwiched between the roar of two box fans.

“[This project] started as a renovation in Poland,” she told me. A public works project put her mind toward the art of preservation and restoration, which NYC’s sixty-five public pools are desperately in need of. They feel like infrastructure from another time. Her work on pools began well before this specific exhibition, parallel to her design work at studio Only If and teaching at Yale. Only If’s research on the topic is compiled in a book by the same title, and she also worked on a monumental model of the Kosciuszko Pool that was part of MoMA’s New York, New Publics exhibition in 2023 (one portion of that massive model is on display at Citygroup, too). But here, the research takes on a more narrative dimension, and one that is specifically attuned to an architect’s attention.

The small space is filled with drawings. Digital architectural drawings in thin black and blue lines tiled at gentle axonometric angles. There is some photography, taken by Polish, NYC-based photographer Anna Morgowicz. More of her photographs of this project can be found in the book Czeczek has published. The drawings depict five pools chosen to showcase the characteristics of each “era” of pool building Czeczek identifies throughout NYC history. They are large, rich, and accessible, plotted at a 1:12 or 1:20 scale, depending on the project. Czeczek’s research moves chronologically: starting with “Public Baths,” we then see “Work Progress Administration (WPA) Pools,” “Mini Pools,” “Vest Pocket Pools,” and finally “Atypical Pools.” The specificity inherent in each representative drawing, versus an overwhelming slew of case studies, is a refreshing focus for gallery-goers. But we are also reminded of the true expanse of the “public pool” typology from one long, tall drawing called Water Map and Pool Catalogue containing models of all sixty-five NYC pool massings.

A study of these pools in drawings reveals a typologically specific narrative and visual history of the city’s infrastructural and formal/stylistic concerns over time. But Czeczek really brings the viewer into the history actively through her design “proposals” for each typology. These range from historically referential and minimal (applied to the earliest “Public Baths” era of the late nineteenth century), to abstract and ambitious (when looking at the “Atypical” examples). For example, her proposal of the Metropolitan Pool, designed in 1922 by Henry Bacon, recalls a public bath’s original purpose as neighborhood laundromat and reinserts this function into the contemporary structure, adding a practical way for residents to engage with their pool.

My own favorite category is the “vest-pocket” era, a title that Czeczek takes directly from Mayor Lindsay’s approach to urbanism during the leaner years of the late sixties and seventies. Akin to the 2010s trend of “tactical urbanism,” these pools and recreation structures were inserted into the landscape, particularly in areas of abandoned lots and underused land, like pocket squares in a gentleman’s vest pocket. I lived across from one of these, a lively pool at Thompson Street and Prince Street in Soho’s Vesuvio Playground, on the top floor of an adjacent tenement that summer, and though my bedroom was the size of a shoe box, I woke up each morning to the sound of the water percolating, spraying and flowing—a welcome sonic cover for traffic and tourists. Why hadn’t I swum there? The pool is surrounded by a high fence, and seems to cater specifically to children: even the public bathrooms there are labeled “boys” and “girls.” If I, a grown woman, had gotten into the pool for a dip, would parents and caretakers have looked at me sideways?

Czeczek’s proposals to make pools more welcoming, accessible, and useful is more than a nice gesture in today’s climate: it’s a necessary mission. I appreciate her minimally invasive, pragmatic approach to the proposals at each level that take into account historic city disinvestment from pools and their relative expense. Pools are critical to the city’s heat abatement strategies today, and “cooling structures” are the hyper focus of many architects globally. Still, I can’t help but think, if a pool is active and open ten weeks of the year, that’s almost as much time as an NFL stadium is active. Moreover, I couldn’t help but notice a conspicuous avoidance of discourse surrounding + POOL. Perhaps the pool that’s had the most press, the project is shrouded in drama, pushed deadlines, and internal feuding. + POOL might float just a few subway stops away from Vesuvio’s pool and Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Pool, and is projected to cost fifty million dollars.

Year-round, wellness-centered uses for pools abound in Czeczek’s design research. It is refreshing to see interest in the wellness space from those that aren’t just interested in buying it, but making it part of the responsibility of city legislation and public architecture. Learning how to swim as a kid, access to saunas and cold plunges, the ability to cool down during a heat wave, and generally new community spaces without high price tags (I see you, Bathhouse) mean that more people can partake in wellness without its hyper-commoditization and gain entry to potentially life-saving cooling places.

There is room for optimism here at Citygroup, in this show and in so many of their showcases. So while you still can, go jump in a New York City pool.