Stradivarius Violin Shaped Swimming Pools

The people at Cipriano Landscape Design created this violin swimming pool for a client in Bedford, New York who is an amateur violin player and collector.

Cipriano Landscape Design & Custom Swimming Pools delivered a great project that simply surprise you. Not only with the shape – bridge, strings, tailpiece, and chin rest of the violin included in the build – but with its state of the art features. The high level of labyrinth can be found as well as in the design, but also in the modern technology the entire pool offers.

Designed in the shape of a Stradivarius Violin, this violin swimming pool is made of steel and stone and features an underwater audio system, two koi ponds and a 12 person spa. The four violin "strings" of the Stradivarius pool contain 5760 strands of fiber optic lighting that help enhance the violin design at night. The project not only pertained to the pool itself but the surrounding landscape as well.

Though not a violin player or swimmer myself, it's easy to appreciate the amount of hard work and clever design that went into make such an exceptionally crafted violin pool. 

The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku | Azerbaijan

Zaha Hadid Architects have designed the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. “The Heydar Aliyev Center hosts a variety of cultural programs, its design is a departure from the rigid and often monumental architecture of the former Soviet Union that is so prevalent in Baku, aspiring instead to express the sensibilities and diversity of Azeri culture. The Center’s design establishes a continuous, fluid relationship between its surrounding plaza and the building’s interior. The plaza, as the ground surface, accessible to all, rises to envelop an equally public interior and define a sequence of event spaces within. Undulations, folds, and inflections modify this surface to create an architectural landscape that performs a multitude of functions: welcoming, embracing, and directing visitors throughout the center; blurring the conventional differentiation between architecture and landscape, interior and exterior. Fluidity in architecture is not new to the region. The continuous calligraphic scripts and patterning of historical Islamic architecture flow from carpets to walls, walls to ceilings, ceilings to domes; establishing seamless relationships and blurring distinctions between architectural elements and the ground they inhabit. The Center’s design relates to this historical understanding of architecture, not through the use of mimicry or a limiting adherence to the iconography of the past, but with a firmly contemporary interpretation.”