This
Futuristic Pool Cleans New York’s Polluted Water, Then You Swim In It
If the Exorcise Pool has its way,
you’ll be taking a dip in cleaned water from Newtown Creek, one of the city’s
dirtiest waterways.
As you approach the edge of the trendy,
industrial Brooklyn neighborhood of East Williamsburg, you can smell what
divides it from Queens: sewage. That plus oil and other industrial contaminants
make the three and a half miles of the Newtown Creek one of the most polluted
watersheds in New York.
But
architect Rahul Shah has a solution: Build a swimming pool.
The
Exorcise Pool--proposed
as Shah’s master’s thesis at Parsons School of Design--wouldn’t use water
directly from the Newtown Creek, but its water supply would be the same, and
its purpose is both to mitigate and reveal the woeful state of local water
pollution.
“It makes people feel uneasy knowing
what the condition of the water you might be consuming once was,” Shah says. “I
want to instigate that.”
Right now, storm water combines with
sewage in a pipe-overloading combination that sends over a billion gallons of
wastewater into the creek each year. Shah’s project would divert an estimated
76,000 cubic feet per year of that run-off into “bioswales”: ravines full of
cattails, bulrush, and algae that would both absorb and carry water downhill.
“They’re a series of plantings that can absorb toxins and, kind of the nasties
of the water,” says Shah.
These bioswales would replace sidewalks
on eight blocks of East Williamsburg, covered by grates where there are garages
or doors to warehouse apartments. “Fortunately, there’s not a lot of
pedestrians walking through there,” says Shah.
Water not absorbed by the plants
would be carried to a series of water treatment technologies, using everything
from algae to UV light to a bed full of reeds that will help trap solids. “I
really wanted it to be kind of a showcase of different methods of water
treatment,” says Shah. But he didn’t want to refine water to the point of
drinkability. “It would be like pond-quality water,” he says.
The provocative main attraction is
what it does with that pond-quality storm runoff, which starts with a patio
full of misters. “That’s kind of like a moment of faith that everyone has to
take once they enter the project,” says Shah. “They’re like, ‘Okay, this water
is coming from the street and the rooftops around here, but it’s been treated
well enough that I’m going to take a shower in it.’”
After the first tentative, misty
steps, visitors can dive into a public pool of the stuff.
Of
course, Shah’s project isn’t likely to happen any time soon, but considering
the success of pools made out of garbage dumpsters, I don’t think New Yorkers
would be scared by a little Williamsburg grime.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1682731/this-futuristic-pool-cleans-new-yorks-polluted-water-then-you-swim-in-it#1
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