The Karkonosze Network of Swimming Pools - A Consensus of Tradition and Modernity

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th and 19th century, bathing areas were built in almost every resorts of the mountain and the foothill areas of the Jeleniogórska V-alley and the Karkonosze (the Giant Mountains). Was the architecture of swimming pools dominated by regional ideologies that have extended the phase of romance, so rooted in the region, despite the fashion for modernism? Was it really the result of a specific regional variety of modernism in which nature, landscape and surroundings played a major role? The local bathing model, in the spirit of romantic modernism, was also adopted for example in Switzerland. There, functional architecture, erected at the time in an unstable period, incorporated into sentimental landscape systems, personified not only the balance in the spatial sense but also in the spiritual one. The bathing areas of the Karkonosze were not only created in atmospheric locations, shaped by nature, but also in a special relations to the existing regional architecture. The aim of the work is to present the advantages of swimming pools of Switzerland and the Karkonosze, which drew their charm from balance between progressive views and the need of tradition and nature. A method of case analysis was adopted, allowing the selection of characteristic design solutions and principles that make up sustainable architecture.