Panorama swimming pool in the Alps
The „Gruebi-Bad“ was inaugurated back in 1931. The hoteliers of Adelboden joined forces in order to build a 50m panorama swimming pool to seasonally adjust the tourism in this Swiss region.
They commissioned the architect Beda Hefti in order to build this panorama swimming pool. He had already taken part in the construction of Alpine swimming pools in Interlaken and Gstaadt, and designed a functional, high-quality open-air swimming pool following a timeless style and fitting it into the hillside.
Today, almost 90 years later, and after a complete refurbishment, this panorama swimming pool looks like it used to be on its opening day in 1931. Nonetheless, in 2011 it was close to a shutdown because the citizens of Adelboden rejected the refurbishment project, but luckily another refurbishment proposal in 2016 was accepted.
The last refurbishment of the panorama swimming pool took place in 2004 and limited itself to reducing the size of the pool to 25m because of the landslide. Since then the „Gruebi-Bad” was just the half of what it originally was and both diving platform and band shell had been removed.
In 2018 the panorama swimming pool was closed in order to start the refurbishing. Taking into account that the whole facility is under a preservation order, the following refurbishment works took place:
- Renovation of the sanitary facilities.
- Adjustment of the swimming-pool technology.
- Rebuilding the children’s pool to its original round form.
- Pool basin extension to its original 50 m and repairing the wall cracks.
- Pool relining with RENOLIT ALKORPLAN XTREME Silver by the Swiss on-site liner installer Kiwi GmbH.
- Rebuilding of both diving platform and band shell.
- Mounting a one-of-a-kind overflow gutter.
Taking into account that this panorama swimming pool is located on a landslide where there is danger of slipping and it moves every year downhill, the architects of Architekturbüro Akkurat Bauatelier had to come up with an ingenious idea to solve this construction challenge. The gutter watergate had to be adjustable, so that the water would uniformly drain in spite of the inclined location of the pool.
The alignment with the original design from Beda Hefti has given back its genuine splendour to the Gruebi-Bad since it now corresponds to the original state from 1931 except for some small details. We wish lots of fun to all the citizens of Adelboden and visitors in this reopened swimming pool, which is by the way one of the few 50 m open-air swimming pools in the Swiss Alps.
