Put a pool in the river.
Seriously.
Shape the whole thing like a plus sign. Make four pools in one. Filter the river water through the walls and 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.
This thing is so badass.
The plus sign was not only the logo. The official design put four pools into one shape, with different parts of the plus able to support different ways of using the water. The walls were supposed to filter the river water around the pool.
That is the whole crazy proposition: do not carry clean pool water to a box next to the river. Put the box in the river and make the boundary do the cleaning.
It is also a huge idea, and the first campaign was not pretending the finished pool would appear next week. The next work was testing filtration materials and continuing the engineering.
The backer confirmation was conditional too. It said the pledge would be charged only if the project was successfully funded. I was a backer of the experiment, not the owner of a guaranteed finished pool.
I wanted to know whether the thing would be permanent. I wanted to know how far the first campaign could really take the engineering. The answers were not all there yet. That was fine. The next test was concrete enough to support.
That made sense. Fund the next test. Learn whether the walls can do what the drawing says they can do. Keep going from there.
The campaign email called it “A Floating Pool in the River For Everyone.” It launched yesterday.
I backed it today.