Design

This 100 ft high sky pool gives strangers the perfect vantage for all your business

Vertigo, meet voyeurism.

We’re finally heading into our first post-vaccine summer season, so you know what that means: it’s time to dust off your swimsuit, shove it onto your 15-months’ worth of Netflix-marathoning, binge-snacking, remote working body, and stare at yourself dejectedly in the bathroom mirror for thirty minutes while wondering how you squandered such an easy opportunity to finally get in shape. Once you’re done shaming yourself, however, why not head over to London’s new, state-of-the-art, transparent swimming pool suspended more than 110-feet in the air between two high-rise buildings?

Developed by HAL Architects and structural engineers at Eckersley O’Callaghan, the “Sky Pool” is a heated, 82-foot-long, 10-foot-deep swimming lane connecting posh rooftop hangouts at Embassy Gardens, a swanky mixed-used residential development that already includes amenities such as a covered dining area, orange tree greenhouse, private theater, gym, and full-service bar.

According to Architectural Digest, the Sky Pool itself is a 50-ton structure and “perhaps the world’s largest single piece of load-bearing acrylic,” over half of which hangs 115-feet above the London streets, thus providing pedestrians the perfect vantage for nearly every angle of your semi-naked body. Heights, gaudy engineering experiments, the ultra-rich, creepy on-lookers, overly chlorinated water — what’s not to love?

EcoWorld Ballymore

Everyone swears its safe — Contrary to our reservations, designers and experts sound pretty confident in the Sky Pool’s admittedly impressive engineering feats. “The side walls form deep beams capable of spanning this distance whilst carrying the weight of the water, as well as resisting the water pressure on the sides and wind loads," Eckersley O'Callaghan told New Atlas. "The two buildings are subject to normal movements, which are inherent to buildings of this scale including wind sway and foundation settlement. The pool structure deals with these movements by not being rigidly connected at both ends; it can slide and maintain watertightness."

Yes... just what we like to hear: a pool that can “slide” eleven-stories above cold, hard, British concrete.

We’ll stick with the Atari Hotels — London can keep its dizzying, voyeuristic Sky Pools, so long as we get those Atari Hotels were were promised last year. If any of the reported eight initial locations look even half as good as the early concept art makes them out to be, then we’ll be spending our post-vax vacations living our best Tron cosplay lives at Atari Hotel: Las Vegas, not evading creepy photo-takers on the streets beneath a “sliding” Sky Pool.