March 16, 2025
The rotunda at Planet Fitness is demarcated by eight rectangular columns joined by an arcing beam. These structural elements are painted purple and probably composed of wood and drywall (and, depending on their placement within the superstructure’s grid, may contain a steel column). A vinyl textile with a metallic trompe-l’oeil graphic covers the bottom five feet of every column. The purple pillars and beam support the drop-ceiling that covers the rotunda space. The rotunda is incomplete, truncated by the fenestrated entrance-containing wall, out of which a rectangular vestibule with thick white columns extends back into the rotunda.
Programmatically, the rotunda is reserved for non-athletic purposes such as paperwork and checking in. It is furnished with a front desk which encloses a rectangular ‘staff-only’ zone, as well as several simple chairs––unlike the complicated ‘machine’ chairs which occupy much of the gymnasium. The drop ceiling hanging above the rotunda provides a bureaucratic, sedentary shelter from the duct work, electrical conduits, and structural beams covering the workout space. These exposed infrastructural components, all of which are painted black, reveal the building’s anatomy. Nude, the exposed ceiling reflects the sub-dermal cognitive focus of gym goers as they strain their bodies.
There is often a functional aesthetic goal to exercise: beauty through strength. The aesthetic valuation of physical strength is a sort of perfect modernist design philosophy where form and function are mutually reinforcing. This is not the mindset adopted by every gym goer, and many would argue that there is a limit to the causal relationship between physical strength and beauty, but the belief that increased strength can increase the perceived beauty in a person is generally observed and has been for millennia. The historical reference is palpable with the classicizing rotunda, and one cannot help but take pleasure in Planet Fitness’ distinction between athletic and bureaucratic ceiling types for its architectural reflection of the psychic reality of exercise. But the choice, which I find quite satisfying, is especially entertaining when considered against the overall visual experience of Planet Fitness.
The name ‘Planet Fitness’ on its own might evoke imagery of a globe with flexing arms sticking out or perhaps martian themed art depicting jacked aliens. But Planet Fitness is covered in gears. The isolated gear symbol is repeated hundreds if not thousands of times throughout the gym. The ‘thumbs up’ in the Planet Fitness logo emerges from a gear (circular and, thus, planetary?). The wallpaper that covers almost every wall surface portrays gears of different sizes printed on a solid background. Purple gears of varying opacity and size overlap on the protective plastic panels attached to exercise machinery. Giant gear shapes are cut out of walls, and three dimensional quarter-gears are deployed as knee braces to help support the rotunda’s lintel. None of these gears ever interlock with each other, rotate, or allude to moving one another. None of the gears ‘work,’ they just represent shaped material.
If we take Planet Fitness to be equating gears and planets, then the planets evoked are all those planets in the solar system that aren’t earth. All those balls of gas or solid that don’t have anything going on. Maybe if the gear had a bunch of gears inside it interacting with each other, we could find a metaphor for earth. But the gears at Planet Fitness are empty and alienated from their purpose. Even when Planet Fitness uses gears to do something in the rotunda, the gears are mocked for their shape and used as illusory structural supports. The decorative regime at Planet Fitness is senseless and apparently divorced from any consideration of signification. Perhaps this is why there are so many televisions inside the gym playing drone and GoPro footage of extreme sports, so that gym goers can use dizzying moving images to distract themselves from the great amount of material that has been spent on saturating the interior with purple and yellow gear clip art.