NEXT time you shed your everyday clothes and don your swimming costume, give
a thought to the place you are about to enter. Once you鈥檙e over the thrill of
cold water rising past your thighs, look at the pool around you. Why are people
there behaving in the way they are? How did the pool come to be the way it
is鈥攊ts purpose and its shape? The answers, you may be surprised to hear,
stretch back to pre-Napoleonic France and even ancient Rome, by way of Tinsel
Town.
As a rule, primates are reluctant to take to the water and when they do, they
are likely to drown. Humans are a rare exception. Although we are repelled by
the prospect of drowning, we feel strangely attracted to the wet. Water has
become the basic element of holiday fun, a glimpse of paradise, and immersion in
it is like an erotic embrace.
Why we are drawn to something so potentially dangerous is a moot point. Could
we be harking back to some ancient state? In the 1920s, the British marine
biologist Alister Hardy proposed his aquatic ape theory, arguing that during
their evolution humans went through an aquatic phase? This 鈥渨et鈥� ape spent
enough time near the sea to develop abilities such as swimming and diving. Or
perhaps we are recapturing our own early affinity with water. French
obstetrician and theorist Michel Odent observed, for example, that up to about
four months of age, babies move naturally and playfully in and under water with
no inhibitions or fear of drowning.
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This early 鈥渇eel鈥� for water quickly disappears, however, and soon children
will thrash and kick fearfully just to stay afloat. The problem is that humans
don鈥檛 swim instinctively. It is not like crawling and walking鈥攎erely
waiting to be triggered at the right developmental age. Swimming is an
artificial technique that is designed to stop us sinking.
So, swimming must be taught. And the history of swimming and of pools can
best be pieced together from the history of how swimming has been taught.
Unfortunately, books on swimming tuition from before the mid-18th century, are
mostly lost or legendary. From the few texts we possess, it is impossible to
make out even a single swimming stroke.
Still, some information has survived. In about 400 BC, for example, the Roman
military historian Vegetius wrote in his Epitoma Rei Militaris:
鈥淩ecruits have to be taught swimming and its employment in warfare in summer.
Rivers and bridges are not always negotiable and, especially during a forced
retreat or while fleeing, the army has to resort to swimming.鈥� Bathing may have
been a typical pastime for civilians, but swimming was a necessity for
soldiers.
As Roman civilisation fell, so too did almost everything related to its
hydrophilic tendencies. Bath houses and aqueducts were wilfully levelled to the
ground. It took 1500 years, until the Enlightenment, before swimming again began
to be valued, both in warfare and as part of a renewed interest in the body.
France began to build an officer corps that was physically fit and able to swim.
In the 1760s, as the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed swimming over
riding as the best form of exercise in his 脡mile, ou De l鈥櫭ヾucation,
swimming schools shot up everywhere. (鈥淣obody has ever been forced
at the risk of losing one鈥檚 life to mount a horse,鈥� wrote Rousseau,
鈥渨hereas the risks of drowning frequently occur to everyone.鈥�)
Swimming teachers opened schools on modified barges anchored in the River
Seine. Their clientele, even after the revolution, included many high-ranking
officers and aristocrats. Soon France became the leading producer not only of
noble swimmers but also of a colossal army that swept across Europe at lightning
speed.
After many lost battles, especially the humiliating defeat at Jena in 1806,
the Austrian and Prussian military authorities had learnt their lesson. In 1811,
in Berlin, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who later became known as the father of
gymnastics, founded his Turnvereine, military-style fitness clubs in
which the benefits of swimming were rediscovered. The Austrians, too, embarked
on serious training. On 6 June 1813, the Kaiserliche und K枚nigliche
Milit盲rschwimmschule was founded in Vienna on the Danube in Prater
Park. Similar in design to the baths on the Seine, the pool was surrounded on
four sides by wooden platforms resting on pairs of linked pontoons, leaving an
elongated rectangle of water in the middle.
So was set the rectangular shape that most pools have followed ever since.
The way people behaved in the pool was also decided here. Soldiers learnt the
art in straight lines, following the order of the exercise field. 鈥淔or
centuries, swimming bore the stamp of military drill; the breast stroke was
taught to a count of four,鈥� wrote the Danish architectural theoretician Steen
Eiler Rasmussen.
By and large, pools stayed the same shape until early this century. By then,
they were straight-sided, reinforced concrete, tile-covered things, created by
people who learnt their trade constructing roads and buildings. But in the
1920s, pool shape began to change: straight and mechanistic gave way to curved
and organic. The transition reflected a change in public attitude towards
swimming, and was nurtured in southern California.
Born in Canada, Philip Ilsley arrived in California in 1925 to try his luck
as a garden designer. He arrived at exactly the right time to fuse garden layout
with swimming pool design. Ilsley dug his pools in curvilinear patterns,
building them with concrete hand-packed over a wire mesh.
He was aided in his schemes by the movie culture. In the aftermath of the
Depression, Hollywood provided a dream-world antidote to social misery. And
movies began to treat swimming, too, as fantasy. The big studios launched a line
of 鈥渘atural lifestyle鈥� films, in which 鈥渦nspoilt鈥� humans were represented in
unspoilt habitats. These escapist movies featured 鈥渨et scenes鈥� everywhere, from
lagoons on tropical islands to jungle rivers and desert oases.
Tarzan, the noble savage, had appeared in numerous films from 1918 onwards.
But the height of the Tarzan craze came in the early 1930s with Olympic swimmers
Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller as the aquatic apeman. Also influential was
the 1932 film Bird of Paradise, which starred Dolores del Rio as an
aquatic child of nature in the moist atmosphere of the South Pacific. These
noble savages swam strictly for fun, with no particular pattern in mind. Unlike
retreating soldiers, Crabbe, Weismuller and del Rio moved in the wet as other
people danced to jazz music on dry land. They moved in unpremeditated ways,
enjoying the weightlessness and freedom of movement.
At just about this time, Ilsley was creating pools that resembled streams and
ponds. It seems he began his first big jungle pool in 1927 on the estate of film
star Mary Astor. 鈥淚t was typically elaborate,鈥� Astor recalled in her
autobiography, 鈥渂uilt into the side of the hill and shaped like a lagoon, about
a hundred feet and of varying widths and depths, with a little sandy beach on
one side and overhanging foliage, and even small bridge over it.鈥�
(The pool was rediscovered in 1990, after decades of neglect. Yet you can
still see its former glory. The riverbed cuts deep and narrow, the steep banks
are covered with concrete packed onto a mesh of steel wire. The imitation rocky
slope dives steeply into the narrow canyon. A sandy beach could be reached by a
ladder, and a cavern was fitted with a barbecue and drinking fountain. Today
ferns, prickly pears and melancholy, drooping branches dominate the scene. A
eucalyptus tree has shot up right in front of the pool-house toilet, blocking
its entrance.)
Such creations were beyond the means of most: Astor鈥檚 father took out a
mortgage of $22 500 to build his pool. But help for the masses came from
a technique that arrived in California in the 1930s. Several decades earlier,
Carl Ethan Akeley, explorer, taxidermist, photographer and curator of the Chicago
Natural History Museum had invented a pneumatic gun that could spray concrete.
He used the gun to create models of animals, squirting concrete onto a framework
of wood or iron鈥攐r sometimes even a skeleton.
In 1936, the Akeley Hall of African Mammals was built in Chicago, displaying
hordes of elephants and gorillas given a realistic appearance with the help of a
skin of sprayed-on concrete, or gunite, as it came to be known. Going from
concrete pachyderms to free-form swimming pools was a logical yet somewhat
perverse step. 鈥淪ometime in 1940, the world鈥檚 first gunite pool was shot, at the
corner of Sunset Boulevard and Layton Drive in West Los Angeles,鈥� wrote
historian Fay Coupe. 鈥淭he pool鈥檚 owners allowed Ilsley to use the pool as a
display model.鈥� Astonishingly, more than 20 000 people signed the visitors鈥� book
and queued for a first look at a gunite pool, a popular oval design that came to
be known as the Blue Opal.
Ilsley and his curving pools can be held responsible for the ensuing
free-form movement that took off in the 1930s and became all the rage in the
1950s. While his early serpentine pools were large, realistic imitations of
jungle rivers, later pools constructed with gunite had to be of limited size
since the single-shell constructions derived their strength from their curves.
John Paddock, a pool builder from Oklahoma, characterised gunite pools as having
鈥渢he structural quality of an egg鈥�. They were relatively easy to make and so
ideal for smaller gardens.
Swimming military lengths in these small, curving pools was just not sensible
and, as in the movies, swimming changed into 鈥渁quatic play鈥�. The emphasis was
more on diving and cavorting, and less on training and teaching. Even the larger
more fantastic pools were used more for play or as garden decorations. There are
numerous pictures of movie stars plying their pools in canoes and dinghies,
dressed in heavy tweeds more suitable for a moorland shooting party.
In a way, these scenes heralded modern water parks. Their spiralling chutes
and curving shapes speak of play and amusement. They are stocked with all kinds
of floating mattresses, easy chairs, wet bars, inflatable bananas, sharks,
ducks, swans, crocs and hippos. Boys have shed their hydrodynamic trunks in
favour of cumbersome Bermuda shorts. In these parks, wading not swimming has
become the normal mode of propulsion. Perhaps the aquatic ape is finally
returning to the land.
One thing is certain: our preference for weirdly shaped pools is a reflection
of an increasingly frivolous attitude towards water. The art of swimming is no
longer primarily a means to prevent drowning or escape an enemy, but, like so
many things in our culture, merely a means to have fun.