The Architect, the Office, the pool and the beach

An Architect, the Office, the Pool and the Beach

Astoria pool

Hamilton Fish Park

Crotona pool

Highbridge pool

Jackie Robinson pool

Sunset pool

Jacob Riis beach

Orchard beach

An Architect, the Office, the Pool and the Beach

by Giovanni Piovene

An Architect From 1901 to 1917, Aymar Embury II (1880–1966), an American architect based in New York City, published the following books: 100 Country Houses, The Dutch Colonial House, Country Houses, Early American Churches and The Liveable House. Embury, who taught at Princeton and worked for Cass Gilbert and George B. Post, among others, built the first part of his career on designs for country houses on Long Island.

Those were the years when Long Island, traditionally the site of the estates of the powerful and wealthy families of New York, was being disturbed by Robert Moses’s plans to pierce it with his parkways and expressways, making it accessible for the large crowds coming from Manhattan in search of finally accessible relief from the hot summers.

Embury was one of the architects of the private mansions sitting on those estates. His architectural universe comprised single-family homes shaped around the individual. Up until this point, the masses had just been a noisy yet almost invisible part of the background.

But Embury’s universe was about to change.

The Office Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign to become mayor of New York City was running into trouble in October 1933 when he asked Robert Moses for his support just two weeks before the vote.

Moses decided to back him, which brought La Guardia the favour of the city’s major newspapers. But Moses only agreed to do so upon certain conditions, and right after La Guardia won the election, he was allowed to unify under his leadership the five formerly independent parks departments of the five boroughs of New York as a single entity, the Department of Parks for New York City, thereby extending his authority as commissioner not only to all the city’s parks, but also to its parkways. In addition, he was appointed to control the Triborough Bridge Authority, the organization that was managing the construction of the key vehicular bridge that was supposed to connect Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan and was allowed to collect the future tolls.

Moses, who years earlier had already envisioned a structural plan of interventions that would have changed the perception of the city of New York, was the right man in the right place for La Guardia, for funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA, the main New Deal agency) had become available to fuel his visions.

Moses set up an office in the Arsenal building in Central Park, where there was room for 2,000 employees distributed among strictly divided architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and construction divisions.

In the second half of the 1930s the Arsenal was the prototype of the impersonal contemporary office that could realize architecture and engineering projects from conception through to construction at a break-neck speed.

Moses never had his own office in the building, for he wanted to maintain a certain degree of detachment from the productive side of his enterprise.

The team, which included William Latham as the operative head of the office as well as the well-known landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke, had Aymar Embury II as the main person responsible for public architec-

ture. Beginning in 1934, Embury’s career experienced a drastic acceleration, for he built or supervised more than 600 public projects ranging from parks, bathhouses, zoos and pools to pavilions, universities, museums and bridges.

The Pool In New York, the summer of 1936 was suffocating, and as a result of this oppressive climate the city witnessed many riots provoked by the scarcity of recreational space in its critical boroughs, such as the Bronx and Queens.

Starting in late June, Moses and La Guardia launched an impressive series of outdoor-pool openings that happened in the span of just a few weeks: Hamilton Fish Pool (June 24), Thomas Jefferson Pool (June 27), Astoria Pool (July 2), Joseph H. Lyons Pool (July 7), Highbridge Pool (July 14), Sunset Pool (July 20), Crotona Pool (July 24), McCarren Pool (July 31), Betsy Head Pool (August 7), Jackie Robinson Pool (August 8) and Sol Goldman Pool (August 7). The openings, which were designed to attract the most press coverage possible, involved fireworks, underwater light shows, musical performances and swim races. Due to their unconventional size, all of the pools, which each cost a million dollars of WPA money, could accommodate 49,000 people (a figure derived from the number of available lockers).

The pools were given simple forms, usually a combination of rectangles and semicircles, and were generally composed of three elements: a bathing area, a diving area and a wading pool. with the latter always being placed outside of the pool’s protected perimeter, for it could be used without paying the pool’s entry fee. The bathing complexes’ otherwise strictly symmetrical plans were therefore slightly disrupted by these perimetrical adjustments.

Embury designed the Astoria Pool, which is perhaps the most astonishing of all eleven, being the biggest and the most spectacular. The pool was tied to the most important infrastructural project accomplished by Moses, the Triborough Bridge, which was actually four bridges designed to solve the infrastructural knot of the parkways coming into and going out of the city.

The Astoria Pool sits right between the Triborough Bridge and the Queens end of Hell’s Gate Bridge – a pre-existing railway bridge – finding space in an existing park. The Astoria couldn’t have been conceived as anything other than a part of the infrastructure surrounding it.

The bathing complex comprises a rectangular main pool, whose size is four times the Olympic standard, completed by two minor semicircular pools alined along the short sides of the rectangle. The three pools are bordered by a very broad promenade, which is encircled by an oval perimeter of bleachers. The long side of the main pool facing the bathhouse slopes gently down toward its centre, evoking the beach-like experience of the shore, while the whole pool’s constant depth allows visitors to wade in it without having to swim. Astoria Pool is indeed a flooded square in a borough scarcely equipped with large scale public spaces.

The bathhouse is the key element that integrates the pool into the city. Perpendicular to the two bridges, it

lies almost built into the park, with the city level being slightly higher than that of the pool. Its roof, which is immediately accessible from the park, becomes the perfect terrace from which to look down upon the mass of bathers and a platform from which to enjoy the infrastructural landscape framed by the two bridges. Made of red brick and glass blocks, the building is a monumental symmetrical machine divided between men’s and women’s facilities. Despite its functional character and the low-quality materials allowed by the WPA’s prescriptions, the scale and proportions give the building and its entire complex the monumentality of a Roman arena.

In this case, the architecture of the pool is perfectly integrated into Moses’s infrastructural machine. Architecture becomes infrastructure and vice versa.

The Beach In Moses’s matrix of New York City’s transformation into a metropolis with regional ambitions, beaches always marked the endpoint of the branches of the brand new network of parkways and expressways criss-crossing Long Island and the Bronx.

Moses’s beaches were often artificial additions to the unsatisfactory natural state of the coasts, which were incapable of hosting large masses of weekenders. New strips of sand – pumped from the bay or transported by barge from distant beaches – enlarged the naturally narrow shores when necessary; according to Moses’s modus operandi, the preparation of a beach was not dissimilar from the construction of a bridge, as beaches were infrastructure too.

Orchard Beach, for example, is not what it seems. Before Moses’s intervention, Orchard Beach was a small one on the Rodman Neck Peninsula at Long Island Sound. The new Orchard Beach project was a crescent-shaped infill that connected the Rodman Neck Peninsula to Hunter Island and incorporated two smaller islands called the Twin Islands, which became the project’s northern end. White sand was transported from distant Rockaway in order to cover the black-gravel Long Island Sound seabed and to complete the semicircle, which was flanked by a large curbed promenade marking the precise limits of dry land. Beside it, sports facilities such as baseball diamonds, tennis courts and picnic groves were introduced.

The monumental bathhouse, designed by Embury, sits isolated in the middle of the crescent, enhancing the scale of the whole intervention. An elevated terrace connects two symmetrical arcaded wings whose plan mimicked Bernini’s colonnade at St Peter’s, as if the oval had been cut in half. The terrace, perfectly axial to the road infrastructure coming from the mainland, was the forced obstacle placed in the middle of the main path to reach the water; one had to go up over it in order to enter the complex, thereby gaining a view of the beach from a privileged angle, for the beach, like the Triborough Bridge, was a masterpiece of engineering worthy of

photographs by Alberto Sinigaglia. text by Giovanni Piovene An english version of this essay, titled An Architect, the Office, the Pool and the Beach has been published in SAN ROCCO 7 – Indifference An italian version of this essay , titled Public works, has been published on Humboldtbooks.com

Alberto Sinigaglia (1984) studied at Università IUAV di Venezia and completed his photographic formation in Milan. In 2010 he has been between the founders of Kassel&Wassel studio and in 2011 he has been co-founder of the MAIBSH project. In 2012 he has been Stefano Graziani’s teacher assistant at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano, (NABA). In 2012-13 he has attended the “Photoglobal Program” at the School of Visual Art (SVA), New York.

Giovanni Piovene (1981), studied at Università IUAV di Venezia and at the École Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Belleville. In 2007 Piovene co-founded Salottobuono in Venice and has been part of the office till 2012. In 2012 he founded, together with Ambra Fabi, the office PIOVENEFABI. He has taught at the Università IUAV di Venezia and ISIA Urbino, and assisted at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (CH). He lectured in many national and international universities.

He is founder and editor of the architecture magazine SAN ROCCO.

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