Central Park West Gym
New York City

This 2000 sf private gym occupies the cellar space of a luxury pre-war coop apartment building on Central Park West in Manhattan. The main goal in designing the gym was to resist producing a space that would resemble a basement recreation room. In doing so, the strategy was to treat the space as one section of a long volume that expands beyond the confines of the cellar walls.

Scale is expanded through the composition of architectural elements. An indoor racket glass wall system creates a transparent plane on one side of the room while a folded, translucent plane on the opposite side is backlit to dematerialize the surfaces. Narrow, opaque bands of white oak form shelves that float in the middle of the glowing planes. Mirrors mask one of the long walls of the space while windows in the opposite wall provide views of the courtyard. The thick composite flooring made from recycled material provides a cushioned surface.