05 / 16CivicRotterdam, Netherlands
A public pool hall on the quay, its roof a row of north-light monitors and a single chimney for the boilers. · Built
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Facts
The Gemeente Rotterdam wanted a public pool for the south bank, on a quay the port had left and the city had not yet filled. The brief was a lane pool, a teaching pool, changing rooms for school groups and a café, in a building that could look after itself for fifty years on a municipal maintenance budget. It is 6 200 m² on a site of 9 100 m². Design began in 2010.
We set the pool hall parallel to the water, as long and plain as the warehouses that once lined the quay. Everything that serves the hall sits in a two-storey strip on the landward side: entrance, changing rooms and plant below, the café above, looking down into the hall through a wall of glass block. The ground floor plan (A-201) is a long rectangle with one thick side.
The roof is a row of seven monitors, all facing north. Turned away from the sun, they let in an even light all day, and the pool never sees direct sun. There is no glare on the water, and the lifeguards can see the bottom at every hour of the day. Arcwright Structures made each monitor a folded concrete beam spanning the full width of the hall, so the roof structure and the daylight are the same thing. Section A–A (S-301) shows one monitor in profile.
The hall is 50 m long under the monitors. Lux Interval placed the artificial lighting inside the same monitors, so after dark the light still comes from where the daylight came from, and a winter evening swim feels much like an afternoon one.
The concrete is white: white cement and Dutch river sand, poured against fine boards. In a pool hall everything is wet, warm and chlorinated, so the list of materials is short. Concrete for the structure and the walls. Glass block where a wall needs light without a view. Stainless steel for rails, ladders and fixings. Nothing is painted.
A pool hall is a hard room to look after. We chose three materials that could take the water, and stopped there.
The boilers have one chimney. It rises above the hall, carries the flues and the building's name, and is the first thing you see from the water taxi stop. The baths opened in 2014. They are busy from six in the morning, when the lane swimmers arrive, until the clubs leave at ten at night, and on Saturday mornings the teaching pool belongs to children learning to swim. Inside, the white concrete has stayed white. Outside, on the quay side, it has taken on the grey of the harbour. In 2015 Beton Quarterly named the baths its Public Building of the Year.
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Ground floor plan of Maas Harbour Baths at 1:200. Walls in solid black (400 mm concrete), openings as breaks with glazing lines, structural grid lettered and numbered; spaces: 50 m pool, changing, plant.
Drawing set · 4 sheets
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