It’s not enough to feel the occasional pressure to work out. You should feel it all the time.
How would you like it if every single room in your house was an exercise station? You think that would suck? Well, maybe it would create a lot of unpleasant pressure to be working out and make you feel like a big loser all the time, but then again, maybe it would make exercising so convenient that the habit would just fold seamlessly into your life. And then, what if your workout was generating the power you needed to cook, clean, and entertain yourself? Would that be enough to make it a really solid habit? Or just an even more giant pain in the ass?
Whether this house is your worst nightmare or biggest fantasy, it now exists. Or anyway, it theoretically exists — the designers have built a model on the roof of an architecture center in Brussels. It contains — or, rather, will theoretically contain?– an arm-workout bureau, a spinning kitchen, and a triceps greenhouse. What does that mean? Well. Here is a video of people working out in this house that may explain better than well, an explanation.
The best thing about this house, IMHO, is that it is named the “JF-Kit House,” and the JF is for Jane Fonda — a pioneer in both physical fitness and the kind of leftist politics that often go hand in hand with preferring your energy to be generated by leg lifts instead of fossil fuel.
The artist’s statement imagines “the ideal citizen as an individual who can satisfy all her domestic energy needs through her own bodily exercise.” This seems to straddle a fine line between “possibly a reasonable idea” and “WTF are you talking about?” As with all these projects that are more utopian than reality, and frankly don’t really have the nuts-and-bolts portion worked out at this point, i.e. don’t actually work, the jury is out on whether JF-Kit House is something the world needs, or needs to ignore.
