Pool House
2015, Los Angeles, CA
News
02
01
Team: Jimenez Lai, May Wang, Roojiar Sadeghilalabadi, Eric Hsu, Pauline Chen, Heidi Alexander, Steve Martinez, Brian Daugherty
04
03
The pool culture of Los Angeles is so widespread that it is normal for any low-rise family homes in various income brackets to have one in their backyards. In an aerial view, it is easy for us to imagine a landscape full of kidney bean shapes in plan, a collection of dips, curves, and scoops in section, and a world of elliptic paraboloid surfaces in three dimensions.
Life around the pool is also very important to the development of Southern Californian culture - a drought in the 20th Century became the very foundation of skateboarding as a sport here in California when a creative use the dry pool took place in Dogtown. One could perhaps argue that this event became the first human interaction with an abstract geometry at a scale we are able to perform actions onto. The pool, when wet, is the epicenter of romantic imaginations - from the puppy love rescue scene in the Sandlot, the jealous passive-aggressive horseplays in Mrs. Doubtfire, the full-blown eroticism in Wild Things, Showgirl, or Alpha Dog, the outlandish extravaganzas in the Anchorman, or the flirtatious cocktail winks in any Bond movies, the blue-glowing wet pool has been a prime setting for iconic moments of fantasy space - getting in trouble, falling in love, or coming of age.

In the Pool House, we propose a roof pool that dips into the central living area to create a set of sectional contractions and expansions. The inverse peaks and valleys provide a series of apt landscape conditions for interior actions. With some swales containing storage, some craters hosting conversation pits, no partitions are really needed to separate programmatic zones.


06
05
Made on
Tilda