Flussbad Oberer Letten

This guide to Flussbad Oberer Letten in Zurich starts with a wooden bathhouse that had stood on the Limmat since around 1900, and what happened when the city switched on the Platzspitz weir in 1951 and raised this stretch of the canal by two meters overnight. It follows how architects Elsa and Ernst Friedrich Burckhardt-Blum answered with a new concrete structure built to withstand the deeper current, in a stripped-down style historians call hygienic modernism. You'll hear about the one flourish in that otherwise plain design: a staircase that flares out like a pair of wings. Stand at the terrace and look toward the channel this pool was built to hold.