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Thursday, August 20, 2015
See-through swimming pool to span a street, 10 stories up
A new £15 billion development in London will offer a pool with a view.
The transparent sky pool floats 35 metres above the ground. Floats, geddit?
Ballymoore
If you want to splash out on a great view in your next home, then
take a look at this "sky pool": a transparent swimming pool suspended
between two apartment buildings 10 storeys up.
The planned pool
will be suspended 35 metres (115 feet) above the ground, bridging the
gap between buildings in a fancy new development by the river Thames in
London.
"The Sky Pool's transparent structure is the result of
significant advancements in technologies over the last decade," says
Sean Mulryan, the CEO of Ballymoore, the developer behind the buildings
and the pool. Those new technologies will create a pool that's 25 metres
long by 5 metres wide (90 by 19 feet) with water 1.2 metres (4 feet)
deep. By our back-of-a-napkin maths, that's 150,000 litres of water
weighing 150 metric tonnes. Holding back the tide is a hefty but
transparent 20cm (8 inches) of glass.
Now that's what I call a high dive.
Ballymoore
The pool forms part of the planned £15 billion Embassy Gardens development
at Nine Elms in south-east London, near the iconic Battersea power
station familiar from movies such as "Children of Men" and the cover of
Pink Floyd's album "Animals". On behalf of the people of Battersea, I'd
ask potential tenants to refrain from skinny-dipping.
If you have forgotten your trunks, there's also a walkway between the two buildings.
With
the smallest apartment in the development setting you back upwards of
£602,000 (around $942,000 or close to AU$1.3 million) it's certainly no
dive. As well as the sky pool you'd have access to a spa, summer bar and
orangery -- I don't know about you, but consistent access to fresh
citrus is always the first thing I check for when looking at a new home.
The
sky pool concept was designed by Arup Associates, which has also worked
on striking stadia in Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Qatar, and the big pointy bus station a short swim from the sky pool in nearby Vauxhall.
Aquarium
designers Reynolds and glass engineers Eckersley O'Callaghan also
contributed specialist knowledge. You might say they offered their
heartfelt tanks.
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