Roubaix – Once a swimming pool and public baths, La Piscine in the northern town of Roubaix is today one of France's most unusual art museums. Converted in 2001, the Art Deco complex still attracts some visitors who remember learning to swim there.
Roubaix's swimming pool was designed by progressive architect Albert Baert and opened in 1932. It remains an emblematic place in the former textile town.
"There's a real emotional bond with this place and people are very attached to it," Karine Lacquemant, curator of La Piscine, told RFI.
As well as a sports centre, which it remained until the 1908s, the complex also served as a public bathhouse.
"It was also a place for hygiene, because [workers' houses] were often unsanitary," Lacquemant explained. "There were no bathrooms or showers. So here at the swimming pool, there were public baths."
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The pool was unusual in that it drew people from all classes of society, "from the sons of workers who lived in courées [narrow courtyards] to the bosses who ran the textile factories", said Lacquement.
Closed in 1985, the centre underwent work between 1998 and 2001 to convert it into a museum of art and industry.
Today, the old changing cubicles surrounding the pool are used as exhibition spaces in which photographs, drawings and textiles are displayed.
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