In 2015, Redrow Homes released a promotional film for a high-rise luxury development in Docklands, quickly pulled after public disgust and mockery. This Infinity Pool appearing in the City of London is about as likely as a pool being fitted in the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, but clickbait images such as this get huge traction – so it’s worth interrogating what they represent for a changing city. Kemsley tells me that while London would be his preferred location, “since the story has broken” he has entered talks for a similar project in Dubai. But don’t expect to see it in the capital. The designer, Alex Kemsley, said, “the building started life as a design concept to push engineering boundaries and literally punch for the sky” and added that there has been “significant global interest” including talks with developers and a luxury hotel chain. We are assured there is in fact a way in and out, courtesy of a “rotating spiral staircase which rises from the pool floor”, and that this is an entirely buildable proposition that includes an inbuilt anemometer to “vary the water level and access to the pool”. The alluring images show the entire roof of an unnamed central-London tower given over to an infinity pool, with no apparent means of escape, as if the digital people are in some kind of sublime prison cell for the super rich. It came to mind today when I saw the CGI renders of Infinity Pool, a speculative-proposal-cum-clickbait-marketing-stunt from swimming pool designer Compass Pools. Like a modernist Robinson Crusoe, the plot then follows the pair trying to get attention from people in nearby buildings to no avail before building a shelter, and developing strategies to catch rainwater to drink and pigeons to eat. In it, Keaton’s character is showing the architect’s daughter the views from the top when a strike is called, workers down tools, power is cut from the lift and the pair find themselves stranded.
In 1924, Buster Keaton approached the Life magazine film critic Robert E Sherwood, to write a script set on an under-construction New York skyscraper.