The swimming pool will be at the centre of Australia's exhibition in the new Australian Pavilion at next year's Venice Architecture Biennale. The project will feature a central pool as an ode to the various iterations of the swimming pool and its place in the wider Australian cultural and spatial consciousness.

Some of Australia’s most remarkable pools, be they natural or man-made, inland or coastal, temporary or permanent, will also be profiled as part of the exhibition.

The project is the work of Aileen Sage, a Sydney-based architectural practice founded by Isabelle Toland and Amelia Holliday, who have teamed up with Michelle Tabet, an urban strategist heading her own boutique consulting practice.

“From pools of necessity to the pools of excess, the pool is a key architectural device, a memory and also a setting,” the new creative directors said. “It has the unique ability to evoke both the sacred and the profane and also aptly represents a distinctively Australian democratic and social space – a great leveller of difference.”