Age can be terrible. The older critics, grouped around the bar at the launch of the Southwark Lido, the Architecture Foundations installation for the London Festival of Architecture, were giving off a whiff of cynicism. More scaffold-housed fun knocked together under unlikely circumstances? More beautiful naked French people? How dull. What did the Southwark Lido have that the last Venice Biennale French Pavilion, also designed by EXYZT, didn't? A full-size swimming pool, it wasn't. The lap pool would have accepted a swimming club of dachshunds, nothing bigger. You couldn't help feeling disappointed (I had my swim suit), but otherwise, I disavow every cynical urge. Like the French Pavilion, a busy and fun open house that offered a rooftop sauna at all hours, it changed the way in which a building works, rather than pontificating about it.
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