Piscine située 160 rue Oberkampf

English translation

The text above is the record as published by the Ministère de la Culture, in French. The English below is a machine translation made by TreeAlive, not by the Ministère de la Culture; it has not been checked by a person. Where the two differ, the original is the record. Report a translation error: privacy@treealive.com

History

After a practice of bathing and swimming in Paris almost entirely linked to the Seine and the canals, the first swimming pools outside the Seine are created in the 1880s. Of initially private initiative, these establishments comprise various baths (sitz bath, full cold or hot bath, humid heat, dry steam, shower), medicinal services (hydrotherapy, inhalations, fumigations) and a swimming basin serving for learning and sports practice. They benefit from condensation water from the steam engines of factories or stations near which they are established, or from artesian wells. The basins are furthermore covered, and thus usable all year round, which was not the case previously. The Oberkampf swimming pool opens in 1887 under the name of Bains parisiens and offers these services as well as a restaurant on the edge of the basin. It is the sixth establishment of this type to open (the first being the Château-Landon swimming pool in 1884), before the municipality also builds some the following decade. The swimming pool is located in a building arranged at the back of a courtyard on a strip-shaped plot sheltering a mixed programme combining housing and commercial activity. The architect Auguste Perrin designed this bathing establishment for Claude-Marie Cathiard, assistant to the mayor of the 3rd arrondissement, who rents the place to an operator. The basin is of small size, initially covered by a metal roof structure with a zenith skylight, and partially surrounded by cabins. Like the seven other swimming pools designed during the last two decades of the century, the Oberkampf swimming pool was modified during the 1920s, a period when many swimming pools are built. Its basin is thus enlarged on the side, now forming an L-shape, a unique form resulting from the constraints of the location; its covering is replaced by a vault of glass blocks, which is uncommon among the corpus of Parisian swimming pools, and the cabins are replaced. Its modifications are lesser than most of the other swimming pools which are its contemporaries. It notably retains its original vestibule furnished with stained glass evoking the destination of the place and the covering put in place in the interwar period. Its original basin is still clearly legible despite the addition of the part in right-angled return, and its dimensions have not been affected by the new standards implemented elsewhere from the 1920s onwards. It is a witness to the first Parisian swimming pools and the evolutions which were theirs afterwards.