GABU Heindl Architecture

The Promises of Modernist Premises:
Pool Trakiya
Collective re-appropriation of a deserted pool as communal outdoor centrer

Inbetween block 1,2,3 of the post-war panel flat housing estates of Trakiya we found this abandoned outdoor swimming pool. A place at once generic and specific, the pool is present through its physical traces only, having been dry for nearly the entire time of its existence. All pool-appliances have been removed, the basin is filled with concrete. While private initiatives to customize these private apartments took off especially after the fall of communism, hardly anybody laid a hand on the communal pool structure.
What does this common ground mean to the people living around it? In modernist housing estates such as Trakiya there is vast in-between space which belongs to nobody in particular and to everybody in common; it is a space beyond ownership and the individual home. It is public as a place for negotiation – for relationships, also conflicts, that are liveable, as much as for solidarity. The swimming pool articulates this promise, more ghostly than concretely, in its concrete remains: the promise of modernist high-rise premises, the promise of the right to affordable individualized housing and of communalism.
A group of neighbours, construction workers, architects, artists, collectively reactivated a part of this larger project: we started with exactly the pool. Together with the inhabitants of block 1,2,3 we turned the pool´s well-organized geometric setting into a central meeting place, a place to exercise, to dance, to debate, to contemplate.