VW-Bad

The VW-Bad is a public open-air swimming pool in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony. It stands in the Köhlerberg district, between the city forest to the south and west and the meadows of the Hasselbachtal valley to the north and east. The site was once called Kuh-Berg, and the city centre lies about one kilometre away. The pool was built in 1951 by the Volkswagen works in just ninety days and presented to the city. Its architect, Otto Immendorff, and landscape planner, Wilhelm Heintz, aimed to create one of the most beautiful and modern leisure facilities of its time. By 1980 it was drawing around 550 000 visitors a year, making it Wolfsburg’s most popular swimming pool. In 1951 Heinrich Nordhoff, then VW’s managing director, officially opened the pool. Visitors find a heated complex with a fifty-metre main pool, a diving pool with platforms at heights from one to ten metres, and a children’s pool with a slide. There is also a baby pool, two beach-volleyball courts, a kick-about pitch, a mud play area, table-tennis tables, and an eighteen-thousand-square-metre lawn for sunbathing. The entrance wing is marked by a round pavilion that houses a restaurant, while the western wing is divided by two semicircular pavilions. Concrete sculptures of the diving tower and slide rise above the water, and the whole site is framed by the city forest and the sandstone rocks known as the Drei Steine.