The Lost Art of Doing Nothing at the Pool
Before screens colonized every idle moment, Americans perfected the sublime practice of getting beautifully, deliberately bored.
I spent two weeks last August at a public pool in Palm Springs that hadn't been renovated since 1958. The cyan tile lining the shallow end had that particular depth of glaze you only find in postwar ceramics — somewhere between sea glass and a chemistry beaker. Nobody was on their phone.
Chlorine and Democracy
The mid-century public pool was an experiment in enforced leisure. In 1954, the city of San Bernardino opened seven new municipal pools in a single summer, each wrapped in that now-iconic cyan tile. The architect, Dorothy Farris, wanted “a shape that invited you to float, not to perform.”
The Architecture of Idleness
Modern pool design has lost this entirely. Today's infinity-edge resorts are built for photographs, not for floating. The vintage pool offered something rarer — permission to do nothing, and feel good about it afterward.