NAO

A Manifesto for a Living Architecture of Water

For decades we have built swimming pools as technical infrastructures.
Concrete volumes.
Energy machines.
Facilities that are often loss-making.

What if the problem were not economic, but conceptual?

At COSTE Architectures, we believe it is time to change paradigms.

The NAO concept, designed for EAULISTIC, is not an improvement of the public swimming pool.
It is a transformation of our collective relationship to water.

Water as a matrix

Water is not just a fluid to be treated.
It is a living medium, a teaching tool, a place of care, a social link.

NAO places water at the centre of an architectural ecosystem.

The pool becomes a lagoon.
Learning becomes transmission.
Swimming becomes experience.

Controlled attendance is not a limit:
it guarantees quality, relationship, attention.

We are moving from a quantitative model to a qualitative one.

Building according to the laws of the living

The 30-metre timber dome is not a formal signature.
It belongs to a structural research inspired by the patterns of the living:
efficiency, lightness, optimisation of material and volume.

Less concrete.
Less embodied energy.
More coherence.

Natural light flows.
Timber regulates.
Air breathes.

NAO does not imitate nature.
It draws on it through its constructive logic.

Care rather than compensate

The bio-mineral water treatment, compliant with the regulations on artificial bathing waters, makes it possible to step out of the aggressive chemical logic.

The water becomes softer.
The air healthier.
The experience more respectful of the body.

Around the pool, the care and well-being spaces extend this coherence: recovery, massages, education on the water cycle.

NAO connects sport, health and ecological awareness.

An aligned economy

The economic model is not a secondary adjustment.

It is integrated from the design stage.

Constructive sobriety.
Reduced operating costs.
Diversification of uses and revenues.

From €2.5M excl. tax, NAO demonstrates that it is possible to design a sustainable aquatic facility without mortgaging the budgetary future of a territory.

It is no longer a constrained expense.
It is a structuring investment.

A regenerative architecture

NAO foreshadows the swimming pools of tomorrow, but it goes further.

It proposes a regenerative architecture:
ecologically responsible,
economically viable,
socially useful,
culturally inspiring.

Each project is co-built with the local community so that it takes root in its landscape, its associative fabric, its schools and its local dynamics.

We do not deliver an object.
We support a transformation.

Building a culture of water

Ultimately, NAO poses a simple question:

How do we want to inhabit water in the 21st century?

As a technical constraint?
Or as a living, educational and regenerative space?

At COSTE Architectures, we choose an architecture that reconnects humanity with the living.

NAO is not an alternative swimming pool.
It is the prototype of a new public culture of water.