Rather than Piscine Molitor, I went to Aix les Bains to have a look at the 1930 swimming pool.
Beautiful window.
Sleeping beauty
The pool is now closed.
Life of Pi
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What a shame that this beautiful pool is now closed! They are dreadfully expensive to operate and maintain, though, so it’s not really a surprise. You’ve immortalized it wonderfully through your cinematographic photos, though.
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Thank you kindly Heide, great to have you back here. 1930s architecture used to be very badly looked at here. To our parents it was a bit like the 1970s architecture to us. Something we grew up in and learned to dislike. Later generations tend to revert that trend. Soon, 1970s style will be looked at as brilliant, and young ones already find Formica tables for instance, really really cool ( https://www.ebay.com/bhp/formica-table ). It’s funny how tastes evolve overtime. I believe this pool will be refurbished and repurposed. Looking at the online documentation, it seems they kept rebuilding the thing over and over again: http://www.patrimoine-aixlesbains.fr/?page=fiches&p=IA73001194
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I had no idea 1930s architecture was looked upon with disdain in France! But I suppose it’s human nature to develop some level of contempt for what we perceive as commonplace. And who knows? Maybe someday IKEA furniture will be fetching the big bucks (or euros, as the case may be) on eBay as well! Thanks too for sharing the link to the pool’s history. It’s just one more example of why I find France so fascinating: It’s like an onion, with sometimes hundreds of layers of history piled onto a single place. Wonderful, Yann.
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Well, I suppose it also has something to do with the period. Depending on how you look at it, you either see Gropius’s Bauhaus and the work of a man who escaped Nazism or alternatively the architecture of the 1930s, the darkest hours of our History. All a matter of point of view.
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Excellent point, Yann — I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I suppose there can be a sort of historical contagion in architecture.
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1930s architecture caught up all over Europe indeed it was some sort of contagion too. A benevolent one however, not like the other one.
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