Gym with a View

aris’ adopted son, the expatriate Ernest Hemingway, referred to The City of Light as a moveable feast. And while that description conjures Bordeaux-stained tablecloths and romantic hedonism, it also underlies a general truth: Paris is damn pretty to look at. Why bottle that up in a gym experience when metropolitan waterways are so often ignored?

Mitchell Joachim had been laboring over that question. A Fulbright Scholar, urban designer, and associate professor at New York University, Joachim and his brother, a physical trainer, entered a competition to design the future of fitness and won with “Human Powered River Gym,” a hybrid, biodiesel, barge-like vessel that would get supplemented energy from its stationary bike-riding gym members. The design was all well and good, but implementing it was another story. Until now.

Partnering with Carlo Ratti Associati, an Italian design firm, they hope to bring this concept to life on the river Seine in Paris. The unforeseen side effect could be getting city denizens out onto the water for the first time in ages, or in their lifetime.

“It’s really a shame, especially in New York, that we don’t use the waterways at all, if you think of the population,” says Joachim. “And Paris is the same way. I mean, you walk across the bridges, sure. But [the waterways] are really underutilized.”