+Pool

New York’s East River offers a beautiful reflection of the city’s dramatic skyline, it services the cruises and ferries, but it fails the people. Except a microscopic sub-culture of swimmers who brave the polluted waters, the vast majority of New Yorkers never dip their toes in the river.

The +Pool is designed to float in the East River, and much like a gigantic strainer dropped into the river, the filtration system embedded in the pool’s membrane will ensure that only clean water will gush into the pool. The pool will simultaneously eject half a million gallons of filtered water back into the river every day, making a demonstrable environmental impact.

A pool for everyone, funded by everyone, +Pool promises to be one of the largest crowd-funded civic projects the world has ever seen, thus far. Spurred on by the overwhelmingly positive response from the public, a technical thumbs-up from Arup, and idea proofing from IDEO, the +Pool team took to Kickstarter to raise the capital to see their vision come to life, and ended up raising $275,000.

These baby steps in cleaning-up the river are critical because they will engage the public’s interest in doing so, and hopefully propel the authorities to invest in a wide-scale clean-up – hopefully enabling New Yorkers to swim in the East River for the first time in over a hundred years.