Water Works

The Globe and Mail, Saturday, July 18, 1998
By Pamela Young

Though public money for refurbishing swimming facilities is scant these days, architectural firms are rising to the challenge. The new aquatic leisure centres are drawing everyone from tots to seniors with their user-friendly attractions.

Traditionally, public pools in Canada have been gigantic rectangular tanks that are ideal for lap-swimming athletes, but poorly designed for everyone else. According to Vic Davies, a Victoria-based architect who specializes in the design of aquatic facilities, this is a ridiculous state of affairs. “Ninety-five per cent of the people who use these pools do so for recreational purposes only,” he said. “Only 5 per cent of the users are involved in competitive swimming.”

In the late 1990s, the budgets for building and refurbishing civic pools are far from lavish. However, an increasing number of architectural firms are rising to the challenge of designing public pools that are attractive to, and appropriate for, a much wider cross-section of the populace.

When the time comes to renovate these monolithic basins, one increasingly popular option is to carve them up into smaller, more specialized pools. An Olympic-size 50-metre lap pool might be transformed into a 25-metre lap pool that is adjacent to a water-slide area, a whirlpool and a shallow section that slopes down as gradually as the shoreline of a sandy beach.

…On Canada’s West Coast, Victoria-based Davies, of Vic Davies Architect Ltd., has found that small, isolated communities are more likely than big cities to build elaborate aquatic facilities. His firm designed the North Peace Leisure Pool, which opened two years ago in Fort St. John, B.C., and serves an area with a population of 15,000. This facility has a wave machine, and an enclosed, see-through glass-fibre water slide that loops outside the building. At different times of the day, this complex’s “lazy river” – a bubbling, buoyancy-increasing tank with a gentle current that travels in a circuit – serves different groups. Children who are learning to swim put on their water wings and go with the flow. Seniors and people recovering from injuries find benefits in the mild exercise against the current.

…Well-designed public pools are civic buildings in the best sense of the word: places that manage in some small way to enrich local residents’ lives, and make them feel that their community is a good place to live.