This sucks! How come we don’t have anything like this in Toronto?
Tridel? Monarch? Menkes? Freed? Who is going to step up to the plate and give us swimming-pool-balconies??
Big deal!
It’s only the 48th tallest building in Mumbai!
The “Aquaria Grande” in Mumbai, India is going to be the first building of its kind!
The last decade has seen buildings in the Middle East feature towers that spin, Jenga-like floors that move, and some of the tallest and/or most bizarre designs imaginable, but until now, no building had ever featured balcony-swimming-pools!
That’s right, folks! Why stand on your balcony when you can swim in it!
And this ain’t no penthouse thang either!
Virtually ALL the units at the Aquaria Grande have swimming-pool-balconies!
Even the poorest people in the building can escape the 110-degree heat by jumping into the 104-degree pool!
And it’s even more impressive from the ground up, where it looks somewhat like the silhouette of a shapely woman:
But there’s more!
See that strange crystal-egg thing in the middle:
It might surprise you to know that it opens up!
It’s like the roof at the Rogers Centre (nee: Skydome), except inside the crystal egg you won’t find a perennial underachieving baseball:
I also noticed a lot more greenery in this second photo. Scroll back up and compare – it’s the same photo, but the egg is open, and there are a lot more bushes and trees!
The people inside the egg look like they’re squared-off for an intense game of Red Rover. In grade five, I broke through the opposing team’s line so hard that I took a face-plant on the pavement, and I still have a scar on my lip.
“Red Rover, Red Rover….we call….”
Well, I don’t know if this venue is safe for Red Rover. We don’t want people falling out of the egg, do we?
So, I’m calling out Toronto developers.
Cube Lofts? Really? Is that the best we can come up with?
Great Gulf Homes, Lanterra, Aspen Ridge, Cresford – we’re all waiting. It’s your move. Impress us!
Ian
at 8:11 am
Ok, don’t get me wrong – this is a great blog, and bad articles from you are few and far between.
But this is the dumbest post you’ve ever made. A few points:
1. Contrary to your twitter post and the multiple references in this article, none of these are “photos”. These are hypothetical artists renderings.
2. These are NOT artists renderings of the Aquaria Grande, which is an entirely different in-progress building in Mumbai, and which is designed entirely differently (and with no balcony swimming pools). Here are the in-progress photos and renderings from the architect’s website: http://www.jameslawcybertecture.com/?section=ProjectDetails&project_id=15#
3. The artists renderings you have included, with the swimming pool balconies, are from a different design from the same arch. firm, called the “Parinee Ism”, seen here: http://www.jameslawcybertecture.com/?section=ProjectDetails&project_id=193&show=7&page=1
4. Unlike the actual Aquaria Grande, I see no evidence that the Parinee Ism is actually planned to be built. There’s nothing on the architect’s site that suggest that this is anything other than a conceptual design. So far it’s just the imagination of an architect. So let’s not “call out” Toronto developers to build something comparable to projects that don’t exist, and for which there don’t appear to be current plans to exist. You might as well be pointing to stills of the “Jetsons”.
5. Your comment that “Even the poorest people in the building can escape the 110-degree heat” made milk come out of my nose. The “poorest” in this (entirely hypothetical case) being the only-very-slightly-less ultra-rich.
6. The practicalities of such a project are likely the biggest stumbling blocks to actually building such a thing.
– First – I’m not a structural engineer – but before I look at this as anything other than in the same category as the Cloud City of Bespin (i.e. physically impossible fantasy), I’d like to hear an engineer’s view of the safety and physical possibility of unsupported concrete protrusions supporting the weight of all that water.
– Second – who provides the pool maintenance, and how are these cleaned? The first thing that came to mind when I saw these drawings was four or five years down the road – looking up and seeing an ugly disease-looking patchwork of varying shades of green and blue, clear and opaque, as different residents put varying care into their pool maintenance. Add to that the invariable shattered glass from at least a few of these over the years (leading to the inevitable questions about safety of such a design – do I really need to go into that?), and you’ve got one ugly landmark.
A few minutes of Googling would have done you some good for this post.
Regards, as always,
Ian.
David Fleming
at 9:53 am
@ Ian
Relax.
This post was dripping with sarcasm. Couldn’t you tell?
Graham
at 11:43 am
I see what you did there.
Ian
at 11:52 am
Ok – no, I guess my sarcasm-meter was off, and I took your post a bit too literally. So re-cast as “Ha – I agree with your implicit criticism of such a loopy idea: here’s why”.
David Fleming
at 1:05 pm
@ Ian
You did peg me on the fact that it may/may-not be the right building, but if that’s the case – I found a dozen online sources that have the “swimming pool balcony building” as Aquaria Grande. Perhaps it’s like kids copying essays in school – one kid does the initial work, and everybody esle copies. I guess I took it from the tenth person that screwed up the address, although, not to pass the buck…
PJK89
at 8:12 am
All we need is swimming pools leaking off the side of buildings in the downtown core dropping gallons of water on to passerby’s….. I can see the headlines now.
Anonymous
at 8:17 am
Well before we do something like this we need to make sure that our balcony glass doesn’t shatter. Can you imagine the lawsuits?
RT2020
at 9:01 am
Or… how about just better build-quality? decent sized units? More intimate mid-rise buildings? Soundproofing?
Kitschy balcony pools and faberge eggs are not that high on my list actually.
Jen
at 9:16 am
how much for the egg?
PMaitland
at 9:54 am
Hope they don’t have trouble with shattering balcony glass, if that is ever built.
JC
at 9:55 am
They could double as ice rinks in the winter!
Oh right… Toronto developers can’t even build balconies withOUT pools with glass that doesn’t break.
CS
at 9:56 am
How about starting with balconies that don’t fall apart after only a couple of years.
milan
at 2:29 pm
And you can teach your kid to skate in winter. In your face, Doug Holiday!
Roy
at 6:11 pm
I think the issue here is that many buildings these days look great when they are built, but they are like the cars of today; they are meant to have a set length time before they break. I’ve seen a lot of older condos (not that old really, from the 90’s) that are in excellent shape today after years of use, and they look better and are more solid (feel) than those which are built today…
This may be another knock on purchasing home in pre-construction. There are aspect of the final property that you just won’t know about until you’re physically standing in it.
This video comes to mind every time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o72fK8XXkQg
666ddt
at 1:38 pm
lmao @ “even the poorest people” …