Put a pool in the river.
Make the walls filter the water. Shape the whole thing like a plus sign. Let New Yorkers swim in the water surrounding the city instead of only looking at it.
I backed it.
+POOL had launched its first Kickstarter campaign the day before. The early money would fund material testing and engineering for a floating public pool.
It was an excellent New York idea. Huge, practical, slightly ridiculous, and aimed at turning an ignored part of the city into something people could use.
The plus shape was not only branding. It created four zones that could serve different kinds of swimming. The walls would do the ugly work of filtering river water while the surface looked simple.
I liked projects that crossed categories. +POOL was architecture, infrastructure, public space, filtration, sport, and civic mischief in one drawing.
It also looked like a startup. The founders did not have the finished pool. They had a strong idea, enough engineering work to say it might be possible, and a specific next experiment the public could help finance.
Crowdfunding made the ask unusually direct. Nobody had to wait for a giant institution to decide the whole project was safe. A lot of people could buy the next proof together.
That was worth supporting.
My work days were full of private infrastructure: servers, networks, storage, and the systems behind an internet company. This was infrastructure you could see from the shore. If it worked, the output would be people swimming in the East River.
The campaign email called it “A Floating Pool in the River For Everyone.”
Everyone was the important part.