To get straight to the point: a private pool is not sensible.

Shotcrete is a climate killer, water is scarce and chlorine is just as healthy as it smells.

And you can't swim properly on an eight-meter track anyway.

But now please close your eyes and visualize this glitter.

How the sun paints countless polygons on the water, which oscillates between ink blue and bright turquoise depending on the incidence of light.

Judith Lembke

Editor in the "Housing" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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In contrast to many other useless things, the pool never resonates with the claim that it is a sensible purchase.

On the contrary.

It is the distinguishing feature embedded in the ground.

While the rabble in America in the 1920s and 1930s was washing off sweat and dirt from the factory in public baths, the American pool culture was emerging in the desert state of California of all places.

Pools formed the perfect backdrop for Hollywood stars to glitter even in supposedly private situations.

It wasn't about swimming, not even about cooling off.

The water was pure projection for the glamor-craving crowd, a continuation of celluloid dreams beyond the screen.

Soon everyone who could afford it wanted this status symbol, whose "purpose was to beautify the garden and liven up the parties," as architectural historian Thomas van Leeuwen writes in his cultural history of swimming pools, The Springboard in the Pond .

status symbol of the white middle class

It was no coincidence that the pool's move into suburban gardens coincided with the end of segregation.

For years, even in the liberal north, attempts had been made to keep blacks out of public baths with high prices and arbitrary harassment.

When the civil rights movement put an end to this, the whites didn't join the blacks in the water.

Instead, the private pool became a status symbol for the white middle class, along with street cruisers and second televisions.

There was even talk of pool fever: the "splash" in the water with a cocktail at the edge of the pool became synonymous with a successful party and lazy doing nothing - simply because you could afford it.

In literature as in film, the pool is often a double-edged sword: a place of debauchery, but it is not uncommon for a corpse to swim in it at the end of the party.

The Great Gatsby shares this fate with Harry from the Nouvelle Vague classic The Swimming Pool, who is drowned by Jean-Paul aka Alain Delon.

Perhaps even more intriguing than the glitter of the water is this inkling that there is something beneath its surface that you can't quite see.

This is irrational because in most cases it's just pumps, nozzles and a few blades.

But what is reasonable about a pool?