World Class Fitness Huaming | VOX Architects

Fitness club network World Class is the leader of the luxury and premium segments fitness industry, providing a full range of services to attain a well-balanced, fit and healthy body — and it continues to expand its geography. World Class Huaming is a new spot on the Moscow network clubs map — and is another fitness club designed by VOX Architects.

Business-task

In 2016, the architects won the contest for the best concept of a new image of World Class clubs. The VOX Architects team offered the client a unified vision of the architecture of interior spaces, interpreted as a collision of two opposites — female and male elements. The interaction of white plastic forms and the brutality of gray concrete results in a third element: saturated pulsating red charges the space with the energy of life, movement.

The triad of the color code unifies all the interiors of the updated World Class fitness clubs. However, each of them offers a unique environment associated with the architecture of the space, location or history of the place.

The premium World Class Botanical Garden fitness club is located on the 3rd floor of the multifunctional business center "Huaming Park" with a Chinese landscape park on the adjacent territory. This context defined the character of the interior and is supported with specially designed lighting solutions and supergraphics.

Organization of space

The red object behind the World Class reception desk at the entrance sets visitors for activity, tones up and invites them inside.

The plan of the club resembles an open fan. The entrance recreation area in the center is laced up with a paned hall that connects various functional spaces.

The World Class Botanical Garden is equipped with the state-of-the-art sports equipment and boasts spacious locker rooms and a 900 m² gym, functional training areas, RPM, group programs and martial arts zones, a hammam and sauna, a large swimming pool with 4 lanes 25 meters each, a Jacuzzi and a children pool. The fitness clubs of the new formation created for the World Class by VOX Architects have specially designed children areas that are detached as far as possible from the workout zones: a locker room, a playroom and a children fitness zone.

Design concept

Brush Stroke

An integral part of the entire concept of the World Class network interiors is a unique graphical language that reveals the spirit of place. Original supergraphics is being developed for the locker room area, which should help visitors mentally switch and immerse into the world of new positive experience. The source of inspiration for this project was Chinese painterly motifs. In the men's locker room, one can see kites hover through the clouds over the blue silhouettes of pagodas; the space of the female zone is decorated with flowers and birds with finely outlined contours refer the gongbi paintings, which means "meticulous brush". In the children locker room area, little athletes meet fairy-tale characters.

Motivating mantras on robust concrete walls are an integral part of the World Class clubs interior. Here the pep phrases accompany the visitors as they move along the corridor from the training zones, past the pool, to the group classes and martial arts zones. The idioms written in Chinese characters mean: "Thriving with health and strength", "Very strong, as if iron-cast", "Tiger's back and bear's waist".

The pool is the semantic center and the focal point of the entire fitness club, the concentration of light and air in it. A huge lamp above the pool basin imitates the circular movement of the calligrapher's brush, with a single stroke forms the sense of space, its plasticity and rhythm. The pattern of the "brush stroke" is completed with linear lights - "dashes". The line is supported by two differently sized white volumes clad with mosaics — a Jacuzzi and a children pool. Their shape is backed up with two light disks embedded into the ceiling and reflected in the water surface.

Cloud Atlas

The image of a cloud has become the key to designing the unique environment of the World Class "Botanical Garden" interior. In classical Chinese painting, clouds outline the boundaries of the "upper", "middle" and "lower" perspectives; passing through the mountain defying any obstacle, hiding and revealing it, they become a metaphor for the transformation of the physical world, making the distant close, and turning the inaccessible to achievable.

Ceiling light "clouds" come in a variety of forms. Curved white lines lead the visitors into the club, then are replaced with glowing discs in the gym and oval light panels in the area with exercise bikes. For the group classes and martial arts area, VOX Architects designed lamps shaped as clouds, as if brought to life from Chinese engravings. In children zones, the lamps remind of clouds from book illustrations; the image of a paradise with soft clouds is visually supported by a system of slides, illuminated contours of niches for recreation shaped as hills and murals on the walls with characters from Chinese games and movies.