Swimming ponds and natural swimming pools exist today because a few people set out to prove that plants and living filters could keep water clean enough to swim in. ASPNSP honors four of those pioneers here, with thanks for the work that made our field possible.
Anthony Archer-Wills is an English-born designer and builder of water gardens, ponds, streams and waterfalls. He began designing water gardens in the 1960s and developed new building methods on his first large projects, including safari parks in England, methods he says were adopted worldwide by the mid-1970s. He has since created more than 2,000 water features across Europe, the Americas and beyond, among them swimming ponds in the United States that pair a swimming area with a planted filtration pond. He is the author of The Water Gardener, Water Power and Designing Water Gardens, published in five languages, and has lectured at Kew Gardens and the New York Botanical Garden. He received the WaterShapes Joseph McCloskey Prize in 2008 and the APLD Award of Distinction in 2013.
Werner Gamerith is an Austrian naturalist, photographer and author, and one of the early pioneers of the natural swimming pond. Born in 1939 in Mödling, he studied cultural engineering and water management at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna. With his wife, the artist Tatjana Gamerith, he restored a small farm in Waldhausen im Strudengau, Upper Austria, and made a natural garden there. In 1983 he built a 140 square meter swimming pond in which a concrete basin, its rim just below the water, separates the swimming area from a zone of water lilies and underwater plants. Naturschutzbund Österreich has called it Austria's first biological swimming pond. He has published many books on natural gardens and landscapes, and received the Konrad Lorenz Prize (1984, with Tatjana) and the Austrian Nature Conservation Prize (2015).
Photo: Pfeifferfranz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Peter Petrich (1961 to 2021) founded Biotop in Austria in 1985 and helped establish the swimming pond as an alternative to the chlorinated pool. Born in Vienna, he trained in horticulture at Schönbrunn and earned a degree in landscape planning from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), with a thesis on water quality in constructed swimming ponds. Under his leadership Biotop grew from a five-person firm into a group of about 90 partner firms that had built some 7,000 swimming ponds and natural pools by 2020. The company developed the Living Pool and the PhosTec phosphate filter, and its early swimming pond concept won the Austrian Prize for Environmental Protection. He co-authored Der Schwimmteich (Callwey, 2006) and was a founding member of the Austrian swimming pond builders' association. He died on 3 March 2021, his 60th birthday.
Gerhard Brandlmaier, an Austrian landscape contractor, began building swimming ponds in 1985 and gave his systems the name BioNova. He made a close study of how natural waters clean themselves and turned that knowledge into designs for private gardens and public bathing sites alike. In 1990 he designed the public natural bathing pond in Herzogsdorf, Upper Austria, about 1,000 square meters and built without pumps, which BioNova describes as the first public natural swimming pool. He is the inventor on a patent for the biological purification of swimming water (US 7,332,082, granted 2008). His student Rainer Grafinger carried the BioNova name forward from Germany. In 2008 BioNova honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his pioneering work in natural swimming pools.
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