Floating Pool Parasite
Nika Bralic
Ivana Brzovic
Ivan Bulian
Ivana Brzovic, Robert Barbir, Nika Bralic and Ivan Bulian are young Croatian architects currently working between Croatia and Belgium. In their practices, they are involved in many projects of different scale and typologies. In 2017, they collaborated on a project Floating Pool Parasite, for which they received a student Piranesi award.
The project Floating Pool Parasite is developed on a graduate design workshop RE: Parasites of Rijeka. It aims to reveal the potential of abandoned urban spaces and their transformation into sites of social interaction by using local materials, tools and building techniques. Observing the everyday life of the city, we recognized the spatial potential of the industrialized coastline of city of Rijeka, and made a proposal for its alternative future. Through focused development of the idea, we have discovered new principles and procedures that can affect the city as a whole, by means of a simple intervention. Mobile architecture thus becomes an agent of an active, participatory environment, reactivating the city coastline area that has been isolated for decades. Based on the utopian visions of 1960s, this project affirms the three key aspects of contemporary society: temporariness, adaptability and mobility. This floating swimming pool structure is (re)interpreting those term, as a new model of sustainable and environmentally beneficial public space.