Dictionaries continue to teach us that architecture is the art of constructing buildings. Building yes, but how? Why? For who? For centuries these questions have found their responses in stylistic rules that were considered to mirror specific world orders. Later on, we rather looked for these rules in the principles that governed another order: industry. More recently, styles came back, and with them forms and formal concerns, but this time most often outside any other system of rules than those that particular architects invented for themselves; the expression of a subjectivity. The seawater pool located in Pirou-Plage, in Cotentin, counts amongst these constructions that attract the interest of those that would still seek a more fundamental definition, a more anonymous one too. Standing about a hundred meters from the coast, it is made up of two pools filling up and disappearing with the tides; two rectangles of concrete accessible through steps and ladders and surrounded by two pennants signaling their presence at high tide. We thought we would talk about a swimming pool, but we end up with even less: water impoundment. Neither really a pool nor really nothing… A concrete wall anchored in the sand, anchored in the tides, installed in the sea; at once off and on the shore. A simple partition: inside, a changing condition, at once sign and monument, both a puddle and a pool; outside, the world, the sea, tides, usages, flags, chaos and the possibility of drowning, in a word what we continue to call the outside, the exterior.
