CANTILEVERED ACRYLIC POOL OVER SYDNEY HARBOUR
A private residence overlooking Sydney Harbour — 2021
Specialist design advice: Reefscape
Delivery & install supervision: Reefscape
Tank structural design & certification: to ASME/ANSI PVHO-1
Delivered with a specialist project team of architect, structural engineers, acrylic fabricator and main contractor.
The pool: 5,935 × 1,720mm, 1,275mm vessel — ~7,400L, two-chamber, factory-annealed
The Brief
The brief was a question: could it be built? The design reached out over the harbour — glass on every side, water suspended past the building’s edge. The ambition was clear; the engineering to realise it was the whole task.
Design visualisation — the pool modelled before it was built.
Structure First
The first work wasn’t the pool. A cantilevered body of water is an engineering problem before it is a design one, and the project began by defining the structural conditions the installation would require — the loads, the tolerances, the interface between vessel and building — before a panel was ever cast.
The Tank
A two-chamber acrylic vessel, 5.9 metres long and 1,275mm deep, engineered and manufactured to exacting structural specification. It was shipped to site in a purpose-engineered steel cradle, craned into position, and set precisely onto foam padding atop the cured, screeded slab.
The Result
Finished… simply breathtaking.
The finished pool.
Specification:
- Two-chamber cantilevered acrylic vessel — 5,935 × 1,720mm, 1,275mm deep, ~7,400 litres
- Walls 85mm (W1) and 100mm (W2 divider); base 85mm — commercial-grade cast acrylic (PMMA)
- Acrylic certified to ASME/ANSI PVHO-1-2007 — the human-occupancy pressure-vessel standard; ultimate tensile ≥ 82 MPa, flexural ≥ 115 MPa, modulus ≥ 3,300 MPa
- All panels and base factory-bonded and annealed free of residual stress; panel flatness tolerance 0.05mm
- Bonded joints certified to ≥ 83 MPa flexural / ≥ 67 MPa tensile
- Installed on a 28-day-cured, unpropped, screeded slab with acoustic matting
