A swimming pool takes pride of place in Australia's exhibit at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, to flag the growing importance of public facilities as cities increase in density and people have less private space. 
The humble public swimming pool may not traditionally be regarded as great architecture, but the aim of good design was to come up with spaces that were lived in and people felt an emotional connection to, said Michelle Tabet who, with Isabelle Toland and Amelia Holliday, is curating the exhibition that opens in Venice on Saturday.
The 60 square-metre pool with steel-framed lounge chairs takes up one third of the space in the new Simon Mordant-backed Australian pavilion; light and sound use the rest of the space to tell the personal stories about pools recounted by Olympic medallists Ian Thorpe and Shane Gould, environmentalist Tim Flannery, authors Christos Tsiolkas and Anna Funder, fashion designers Romance Was Born, musician Paul Kelly and Indigenous art curator Hetti Perkins.
Living arrangements were increasingly focused around apartments and central city living, with the associated benefits of walking and greater use of public transport, and the basic swimming pool was an increasingly important piece of infrastructure needed to keep housing affordable, Ms Tabet said on Thursday.
"That's a part of maintaining that affordability of housing - not placing these things in apartments and ensuring that more people can see and benefit from them," she told The Australian Financial Review from Venice.
"It's incredibly important that those parts of the city remain open and public. But they remain a place where people who are different, who come from different backgrounds with their own agenda can continue to meet publicly. They can be together together or alone together."
La Biennale di Venezia opens on   May 28 and runs until   November 27.