The reflecting pool in Washington DC has something of a cursed history. It was built in the 1920s as a shallow pool designed to reflect – the clue is in the name – the Lincoln and Washington memorials for visitors to the National Mall.
But it was built badly. Washington DC is famously a swamp, and the pool’s foundations were badly designed. By the 2000s it was leaking an astronomical 500,000 litres of water every week through cracked, damaged foundations, and the water was routinely too filthy to reflect a thing.
It was rebuilt more-or-less from scratch in a three-year renovation costing $34 million, finally reopening in the summer of 2012. Within weeks, the pool was once again full of blooms of algae. It has returned perennially in the decade since, a seemingly unfixable problem. A particular nadir came in 2017, when the pool started filling up with dead ducks and ducklings.
Sombre, certainly, but maybe not the mood the pool’s designers were aiming for.
Shorts
