Pruned’s recent posting on ocean pools, reminded me that I had always planned to follow up on the ocean pools of Sydney survey that I posted a little while ago with one on the harbour pools.
The harbour has a number of pools within the heads that provide a service less concerned with the taming of the ocean as they are along the coast and more with a nineteenth century notion of orderly bathing in calm water.
At their most minimal, these pools, sheltered from ocean swells leave behind the monolithic carved earth geological bathing of the ocean pools for a finely drawn line in the water that separates pure leisure from the leisure+infrastructure+public transport mode of the greater harbour space.
At their most formal they are olympic pools located on the harbour edge; highly controlled wave resisting, chlorinated vessels of sky blue water.
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I have looked for all of the publicly accessible baths and pools around Sydney Harbour. In addition to these there are of course hundreds of private pools right on the waters edge, as if that much water in front of you were not enough, but I will leave those to someone else to collate.
If I have missed any and if I have the names wrong, let me know and I will update the post. Curiously and likely due to human error, I found the exact number of pools within the harbour as I did along the coast (26).
Working clockwise from South Head, starting at Watsons Bay:
Parsley Bay:
Nielson Park with its excellent change rooms that provide a modesty tunnel for safely traversing the way to the harbour away from prying eyes:
…continue reading…
Some photos of nice projects on display at the UTS Exhibition — Even Better than the Real Thing, curated and organised by Dr Sam Spurr. The show was very good I thought — UTS definitely has the clearest agenda of the three architecture schools in Sydney and their projects had a very strong graphic sensibility, if a lack of plans, sections and the like. The projects are generally about the possibilities of very focussed areas of study; structural facades, data collection and visualisation, visual indertiminancy, and (as Anthony Bourke refers to it) post-kids-with-balloons-urbanism.
Being a bad blogger, I neglected to get the names of all the student’s work shown here, so if you know, let me know! + Insert iphone dodgy camera disclaimer here.
Daniel Jaramillo (MArch)
Diana Quintero (MDA)
Amanda Clarke and Alina McConnochie (MArch)
Jessica Dixon (MDA)
Amanda Clarke. Shenzen Urbanism studio. (MArch)
The Street as Platform studio had a series of visualisations playing continuously. Difficult to photograph, and they probably could have done with a better projector, but an impressive result from a studio where the students had no coding skills at the beginning of the two week course.
Phil Clemens
And finally, Jason McDermott’s PHD work in progress, using wii-motes as interactive drawing devices. Pictured above, in ‘Awesome Romance’ mode.
Tilt-shift video, monster trucks, robosaurus, simulated destruction derby at minature/actual size:
Metal Heart from Keith Loutit.
By way of contrast, Daniel Everett’s ‘Court’ series presents shadowless, depthless spaces that are nonetheless similarly descriptive of movement and contact:
View Original.
