Pools & Spas
In the pool renovation business, builders face a persistent challenge: how do you deliver long-term performance in an industry that has historically been built around short-term surface solutions? According to Aaron King, common problems such as cracking, staining, and delamination are no longer inevitable, but are now entirely avoidable.
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At Danville Community High School in Danville, Ind., the school's aquatic program had long operated under constraints that were becoming impossible to ignore. The existing pool—aging in both infrastructure and design—was struggling to keep pace with the demands of a growing student population, an increasingly competitive swim program, and modern expectations for safety, efficiency, and accessibility.
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For the millions of homeowners with swimming pools, water conservation means rethinking how they manage one of their property's most water-intensive features. The good news? One of the most effective solutions is already well-established—the automatic pool cover.
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Watershaping mastery reveals itself in many different guises, from the ultra-elaborate and complex to the relatively simple and sublime. The Santa Monica project by Kevin Cobabe pictured here fell into both categories, with a visually simplistic design that featured a host of fine details and precise construction.
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In Horseshoe Bay, Texas, Southern Living Pools and the shotcrete specialists at Texan Gunite faced an unusual challenge: constructing a large, curvilinear watershape with most of its structure suspended directly above Lake LBJ. The ASA award-winning Yates Project demanded months of coordination, careful logistics, and precise dry-mix shotcrete placement to transform an ambitious lakeside vision into concrete reality.
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The health and safety of public aquatic facilities rests on a complex foundation of science, engineering, operations, and human behavior. At the center of that effort is the Model Aquatic Health Code (MAHC), a living document that has become the most influential guidance resource for aquatic facilities across the United States.
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Most pool heaters don't fail because they're old. They fail because small problems are ignored until they become expensive ones. Here, Rocco Russo, senior trainer for Fluidra Pro Academy, takes a deep dive into how heater care saves money, protects homeowner investments and builds trust. Keeping a few technical detail and procedures in mind can offer a range of benefits.
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Swimming pools and other types of watershapes encompass a range of issues that are specific to structures that contain water. Inspecting them as part of real estate transactions, and for several other purposes, requires specific expertise and a systematized methods of recording and reporting inspection results.
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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as California reinvented itself as a land of health, leisure, and spectacle, a new aquatic building type emerged along its coastlines and growing inland cities: the plunge. In a time before the emergence of the backyard pool industry, the plunges were grand civic destinations, often enclosed, frequently ornate, and almost always tied to broader visions of social life and economic development.
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The Model Aquatic Health Code (Part II): Future Foundations