Wouldn’t it be a great idea to build a big swimming pool in the courtyard of the Louvre? How about bolting diving boards onto the back of the the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so summer visitors can leap into deep basins below? These plans might sound too far far-fetched to be true, but Berlin is on the way to realizing a project that is strikingly similar.
The German capital is currently fielding a proposal to create a 750-meter (2,460-foot) swimming pool running directly past its Museum Island, a Unesco World Heritage Site that possesses what could be Europe’s heaviest concentration of art and archaeological artefacts. What makes the plan yet more striking is that the “swimming pool” (those quotation marks are merited) already exists. The new place for swimmers will not be a newly constructed basin, but an arm of Berlin’s River Spree. If the plan goes ahead, Berliners could have a sparkling clean stretch of water 15 times the length of an Olympic swimming pool to dive into every summer. There’s still an “if” there, of course, but as the plan jumps successfully through hoop after hoop, it is already well on the way to becoming reality.
