Why do empty swimming pools feel so strange?

An empty pool feels strange partly because a pool is one of the loudest, busiest kinds of room, and it has suddenly gone still. Water, tile and glass were built to carry splashing and shouting, and with the swimmers gone, the room is left holding a surface that should be moving. It looks ready for people who never arrive.

What does a pool lose when the swimmers leave?

Bodies in water are loud: shouts, splashes, whistles, the slap of feet on wet tile. A still pool takes all of it away at once. Tile, concrete, glass and the water itself bounce sound back, which is why one aquatics supervisor called his leisure pool "almost like a megaphone when lots of kids are in it." Without a crowd, the same hall carries the smaller sounds instead.

That makes pools different from other rooms in the liminal space family. A food court before opening has lost its crowd, but nothing in the room was meant to move. In a pool the water was.

The oldest photograph in Liminal Spaces is of a still pool. In 1914 Bedford Lemere and Company, a London firm of architectural photographers, photographed the first-class swimming bath of the liner Aquitania. The water is so still it looks solid, the cubicle curtains are drawn, and a wicker chair stands near the far end.

Is the water really still?

Not always. Public pool water is pumped constantly through filters, with skimmers drawing it off the surface and jets pushing it back. Several US state codes call for the whole volume to pass through about every six hours. During the 2020 closures, Maryland's health department told operators of closed pools that hadn't been winterized that the circulation pumps "must operate 24 hours a day" so the water would not go stagnant.

So a locked pool at 3 a.m. may still be filtered and moved as if a crowd were coming in the morning. The building keeps working without an audience, as in lights left on. What goes missing is the swimmers' share of the movement, the wakes along the lanes and the wash against the walls.

On the deck of a locked pool, the pump may be the first thing you notice, with the faint slap of water over the gutter lip beneath it.

How did the Poolrooms turn this into a genre?

The most famous liminal pool images are not photographs. From the end of 2020 the artist Jared Pike began posting computer-rendered images of impossible tiled pools, built in Blender in a series called Dream Pools. Fans folded them into the Backrooms legend as the Poolrooms.

Nothing in them is real, so no caption can explain why nobody is swimming. The gap between what the room is for and what is happening in it is left open.

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