The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture

This story is part of Design Goals, our week-long series celebrating the interplay between sports and style.

Although the kidney-shaped swimming pool came into vogue in the United States during the midcentury era, particularly in Southern California, the origins of its undulating shape can be traced to the work of Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto.

In 1939, Aalto completed his seminal Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, for Finnish arts patrons Marie and Harry Gullichsen, who told Aalto and his wife and business partner, Aino (who designed the interiors), to treat the home’s design as an experiment. The rural residence combined many of the ideas and themes that Aalto was interested in exploring during what was a key moment in his shift away from the more rigid forms and rectilinear lines of European modernist functionalism—among them organic, natural forms. In the yard, Aalto designed a pool with a distinctive outline evoking the natural contours of lakes and ponds, and curved edges at the bottom that created a bowl-like void in the ground.

It wasn’t until 1948 that a pool with a similar configuration made its way to the United States. Twentieth-century landscape architect Thomas Church was commissioned to design the garden for the family home of Dewey and Jean Donnell family in Sonoma, California, assisted by a young Lawrence Halprin (who went on to design Sea Ranch) and architect George Rockrise. The Bay Area–based landscape architecture titan was a friend of Aalto’s and an admirer of his work. Church’s landscape designs reportedly moved away from sharp angles in favor of more rounded shapes after he met the Finnish architect in the late ’30s. His designed for the Donnell Garden included a kidney-shaped swimming pool as the centerpiece.

Following its completion, the Donnell House and its sinuous pool were widely published throughout the ’50s, appearing on the covers of lifestyle magazines like Sunset and House Beautiful and coming to epitomize the midcentury outdoor lifestyle in California. During the ’60s, the combination of widespread postwar economic prosperity and major changes in urban planning regulations contributed to a single-family housing boom that saw the construction of more than 150,000 swimming pools at California homes. Kidney-shaped pools were particularly trendy: up to 20,000 were installed per year in the greater Los Angeles region, accounting for around 60 percent of all pools in California. 

When the California drought took hold in the mid-’70s, the state prompted homeowners to conserve water and drain their pools. Skateboarding had recently exploded from a teen hobby of the ’50s and ’60s to a full-blown freestyle scene thanks to the early-’70s invention of the urethane skateboard wheel and the rise of U.S. surf culture, with California as the epicenter. The empty residential swimming pools, with their rounded floors, which change in depth from one end to the other, proved fertile ground for inventing new skate tricks. Professional skating teams such as the Zephyr Competition team (known as the Z-boys) began to emerge, breaking into backyard pools for illegal for skating sessions.

Today, kidney-shaped pools have endured as icons of both midcentury-modern residential design and quintessential Californian skateboarding culture. Bowls have since become a key component in skatepark design.

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This article was originally published on May 24, 2019. It was updated on August 2, 2024, to include current information.

Top photo courtesy The Agency

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