Prefab Rooftop Swimming Pool

Just a piece of architectural inspiration which I found via Matarua’s Tumblr blog Obsidian Bureau. It’s a swimming pool on top of the Hemeroscopium House, a residence in Spain designed by Ensamble Studio last year. It must be extremely exciting to swim here. According to Matarua, “the cantilevered lap pool is actually one giant precast beam which seems to defy all rules of gravity”. Altough I love the building, I think the theoretical talking around it is rather pretentious and excessive. Here’s a phrase recorded by the architects themselves:

“Hemeroscopium is for the Greek the place where the sun sets, an allusion to a place that exists only in our mind, in our senses. It is constantly moving and mutable, but is nonetheless real. It is enclosed, delimited and suggested by the horizon, though it is defined by light and only takes place in a precise moment of time.”

To me it would have been equally great when the house would have been introduced as a collection of concrete elements carefully arranged into a gorgeous home. But somehow architects need concepts, therefore I like the comments on Tropolism that call the building post-OMA. The villa is prefabricated and constructed in one day as you can see in the video below.