Infrastructures of Self Design do more than sculpting bodies; they operationalise, monetise, transmit and feed ideology in tandem with health policies, social structures, education, fashion, popular media and youth culture. Intimate Vascularity aims to investigate and con- front contemporary Health Club Architectures within the global north, as a conglomerate type hosting among other functions: gymnasiums, pools, tanning-booths, saunas, locker,- and relaxation rooms, as critical sites wherein competing ideological positions about bodies and their environments are aestheticised. By doing so, it aims to explore, how sculpting the human body via wellness industries, driven by health, fitness and beauty industries, is in turn transforming territories due to their severe climatic impact.

Recent studies have highlighted a growing trend within the consumption of Health Clubs, indicating that in 2023 Gen Z and Millennials consume and invest more in spa and gym memberships, then any other generation since the 1950s. This trend resembles a world wide phenomena and peaks within the East and West Coast of the US, in specific in San Francisco and New York with the highest density and amount of Health Club subscribers. Moreover surveys indicate that within a time of global turmoil, members find refuge within the ritualistic, body centred, ambient, safe space that those Fitness Infrastructures provide, supporting the continuous upward trend in a time of perpetual crises. The research takes New York as an investigative site, offering the highest density of Wellness Memberships, while simultaneously being home of the fastest growing body-making cooperation: Equinox Fitness4 “It’s Not Fitness. It’s Life”.

While Care became the buzzword of the last decade within architectural debates, uncovering the crisis of the welfare state by expos-ing the conflict between self-care and private care6, this research explicitly takes distance from such discourse. It approaches Health Club Architectures as more than neutral infrastructures or framework of social aspirations, but ashenchmen of an “architecture(...) operative in the transformation of individuals”. The individual capacity of designing the self through Architecture, via media and infrastructure, entangling technological and environmental aspects, sit at the core of this research. Therefore Intimate Vascularity endeavours to move beyond esoteric framings of “HealingArchitectures”, by focusing on the over saturated amount of body-technological self tracking media, such as the operative machinery that allows exercise communities to gather via pipes, that allow the flow of blood, sweat and drugs to unfold while vapour, steam and liquidity are released, controlled and extracted concurrently.

Intimate Vascularity claims that it is within these transcalar machines, that societal, environmental and technological questions are orchestrated through ritual, protocol and convention of bodies. Therefore its exhaustive flows of fluids, energy and social media self-representation will be used as vehicles that allow to interrogate the artificial metabolism of the wellness industry, as a product of collective hyper-vigilance, beyond which the thesis aims to uncover the physical, social and moral conditioning of subjects, not as a side effect of physical fitness, but as its actual target.Architecture here sets the stage for individual bodily transformation, bio-amplification and maintenance, while its aesthetic capital is used at a great divergence to cater to different aesthetic tropes. From spiritual to brutalistic, from therapeutic to fetishistic; surfaces, signs, materials and spaces, position Infrastructures of Self Designas brands, recruiting identifiable distinct clientele, while enhancing its signvalue through usage. While doing so, the full repertoire of experience designis exploited by using sound, scent, light, screens and touch as extended bodies that blur the de- sired “longing for completion of the self (...) to enlarge and prolong it to eternity”. Therefore the research pursues to position Health Club Architecture as spatial enabler that allows to hinge on a particular under- standing of the body; as a collection of parts, a machine in need of machines for repair, maintenance, completion and exhibit. Only by viewing the body as incomplete and ever-adaptable, the surrounding machines of exhaustion and relaxation can be understood as a prosthetic.

By inhabiting the machinery of Self Design, IntimateVascularity aims to use architectural research, not to retrospectively problematise contemporary debates but as a medium through which a present day operation can be entangled: as a political act of projecting into the future.By rendering visible the production of desire inherent to the described architectures, a relational discourse between the human body, late capitalisms extractive organs, contemporary media and architecture is envisioned.

A series of ephemeral installations in form of scenography, pavilions, performances, media objects and exhibitions will extend theoretical encounters into propositional reflections, aiming to conduct this research through a design by research, research by design methodology.