Your sweaty neighborhood gym has nothing on these beautifully designed fitness facilities full of multi-story climbing walls, skybridge pools, dramatic boxing rings, nightclub-style lighting and cool typographic murals. It looks like the architects and designers had as much fun dreaming up these beautiful modern fitness centers as clients get to have using them. Do yoga in a glass box overlooking Manhattan, lift heavy in a former communist monument, test your arm strength in the world’s largest bouldering gym or kickbox in a room that looks like a sci-fi movie set.

Wellness Sky in Belgrade, Serbia by 4of7

‘Wellness Sky’ is a pretty good name for a glassy triangular building cantilevered over a river and pedestrian esplanade in Belgrade. The building began as a communist monument known as the ‘Danube Flower,’ but lay abandoned throughout the 1990s during the Yugoslav wars. Today, its exterior looks much the same, but the interiors by firm 4of7 are transformed, with the backlit, faceted semi-translucent Barrisol stretched ceiling brightening up a fitness facility.

Brooklyn Boulders Coworking Space in Somerville, Massachusetts

Doesn’t this look like fun? Graffiti from local artists encourages you to find your strength at the Brooklyn Boulders facility in Somerville, Massachusetts – which is actually an unusual take on the co-working environment, seeking a balance between work and play. The facility hosts the usual work tables, but they’re a pretty minor feature compared to the 40,000-square-foot rock climbing wall that reaches all the way to the ceiling.

American Copper Gym in NYC by ShOp

What’s inside the skybridge connecting America’s tallest copper towers? A double-height fitness center with enviable views of New York City. This skybridge at SHoP’s residential towers, known as the American Copper Buildings, contains a 75-foot lap pool overlooking the East River, a climbing wall and a fitness center as well as a hot tub, bar and lounge.

The Burrow: Boxing Gym in Kuwait by Lab 100

Sabhan, Kuwait gets its first commercial boxing gym in the form of ‘The Burrow’ by Lab 100, a beautifully designed facility full of semi-private workout halls, a huge boxing room and an elevated crossfire area. “While designing the space, the key factor was in emphasizing a natural flow of movement and the element of surprise,” say the architects. “In order to reach the workout area, members have to take a narrow corridor, passing by the locker area and into the main workout hall. In contrast to the corridor, the spacious workout area embraces an elevated boxing ring in its center. The boxing ring is dramatically lit with nine pendant lights to highlight its importance in the facility.”

Rock Gym in Polur, Iran by New Wave Architecture

The striking exterior of this facility in Iran sort of looks like a rock cracked open to reveal a geode inside, a fitting aesthetic choice for a huge climbing gym with boulder-like interior walls. New Wave Architecture found inspiration in the large-scale movements and tectonic forces of the earth’s crust for the design, which also enables climbing up the exterior.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Beautiful Modern Gyms And Fitness Facilities

No ladders are required to get all the way to the top of this floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in a Japanese home, built into a specially designed oblique exterior wall for both easy access and earthquake resistance. Shinsuke Fujii Architects rose to the challenge of a tight lot with a smart design that uses a high ceiling, split levels and climbable surfaces to make the best possible use of every square inch of space.

First of all, that wall. From the outside of the home, you can see that the neighboring home on the right is awfully close, and taking up the maximum amount of living space on the lot would have been a tight fit. The architects leaned this wall of the home toward the neighbor at the top, leaving a wide space at the base for the front entrance, which is protected from rain. There are no windows on this side, eliminating privacy concerns that would normally arise from being right across from each other. The home is also perched over a small carport that’s sized just right for the client’s compact car.

Inside, this angle creates the perfect surface for a super-tall bookshelf that’s easy to climb, making it possible to use the entire wall for storage. Plus, the grid of the bookshelf makes the wall more structurally stable, and the bookshelf won’t collapse onto the interior in the event of a quake. Books, magazines and storage boxes easily slot into the deep niches while the extra-wide shelves double as steps.

Stairs lead from the bookshelf up to a lofted living area, which gazes out onto views of the city rather than the neighboring houses. An outdoor terrace doubles as a giant skylight, and the ceiling of the kitchen below becomes a surface for a table, with additional storage set into the wall. It’s a great example of thinking outside the box to create a home that feels spacious, airy, private and well-lit without sacrificing storage space, even on a tiny urban parcel.

In the words of venerable modern philosopher Ice Cube, ‘it’s on like Donkey Kong’ – literally – at Berlin’s Mount Center climbing park, which features elevated platforms that look an awful lot like those seen in the classic video game. Located in Mitte, the city’s hip central borough, the park offers a massive parkour course that takes visitors higher and higher up into the sky, amidst suspended vehicles and other recycled objects.

The park opened back in 2010, and features six different courses of varying levels of difficulty that may also remind some people of the courses on the reality television competition American Ninja Warrior. If you’re not exactly a parkour master, you can take a short training class before they use throw you out onto this open-air system of ropes, barrels, tires, platforms and bridges.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BS9Uce9FMou/?tagged=mountmitte

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mike Lima (@neuernameistinarbeit)

At 50 feet high, its pinnacle also gives you pretty great views of a lovely green area of Berlin:

h/t Inhabitat; photos via BerlinSidewalk.com and MountMitte.de

If you’re afraid of heights, a mere glance at these photos taken by Russian daredevil photographer Angela Nikolau might be enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. The 23-year-old scales some of the tallest skyscrapers in Russia and Asia, either using a selfie stick, a drone, or bringing her boyfriend Ivan Kuzenetsov along to take the photos. And as if perching on the edges of structures at such extreme heights isn’t enough, she often does yoga poses or wears stilettos while doing so.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

The self-taught climber is not too concerned about bypassing security and breaking trespassing laws to capture these incredible images, and virtually no building is too tall. Angela and Ivan climbed all 2,000 feet of the Golden Finance 117 building in Tianjin, China last fall.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

Other illegal conquests include the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the Shanghai Tower in China, the Tsing Ma bridge in Hong Kong and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Unsurprisingly, many of the photos have to be taken late at night to avoid being caught.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

Angela’s casual poses might be the most disconcerting aspect of the photos, especially for those of us who imagine death-gripping the edge if we managed to make it up that high. She’s often lounging dangerously close to certain death, holding on to a ladder with just one hand or hanging barefoot off cranes. In some images, she’s held aloft by her boyfriend, dangling hundreds of feet off the ground.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by A N G E L A N I K O L A U (@angela_nikolau)

Check out all of Angela’s images at her Instagram, @angela_nikolau.

Test your climbing skills with a vertical ascent through three stories of a gallery atrium with the newest interactive installation by design collective Numen/For Use. Occupying Austria’s Architekturforum Tirol, ‘Tube’ is a network of connected safety nets suspended from the walls and ceiling, inviting visitors to crawl, slide and scramble until they hit various dead ends providing vantage points out the windows or onto other areas of the installation.

The angles are as irregular and organic as if they’d been woven by a spider or silkworm, creating a sort of human cocoon. The cables attaching the installation to the wall are elastic so the whole thing gently bobs up and down with the movement of its occupants at any given time. The structural support is designed in such a way that anyone climbing inside experiences the sensation of free-floating.

Stretching upward through an oculus in the gallery’s second floor, ‘Tube’ is an abstract composition, its jagged black form like a brushstroke against a network of erratic geometric lines. Contrasting against the white surfaces of the space, the installation stands out in stark relief, placing the emphasis on the shape of the nets and the bulges created by the people moving around inside.

Numen/For Use previously created a grid of climbable strings, a bounce house for adults and a network of translucent tunnels made of packing tape, humans crawling around inside like trapped insects.