Wickerham & Lomax: Soft Gym

DAN: When we started designing Soft Gym, we thought it’d be another outdoor commission, a park, a few sculptures, maybe a place to rest. But it became something else. It’s more like a rehearsal space for public feeling.

MALCOLM: Yeah, it’s not a gym for fitness; it’s a place where emotion, behavior, and manners get trained alongside muscle. The walls are padded, the surfaces are mirrored, everything’s reflecting some version of use.

DAN: There’s a story underneath it too. When you left home, your grandmother said, don’t forget, you’ll always be a country boy. Mine said, go reinvent yourself. The park sits between those two pieces of advice, what you inherit and what you invent.

MALCOLM: That tension... that’s the workout. The pressure of thousands of emails, city permits, and tiny negotiations; that’s how the gym became a gem.

DAN: We were looking at how art history handles bodies and surfaces. The gym rig, flipped on its side, became a kind of sunset, a landscape painting. A weight plate nods to Madonna and Child tondos, but also Janet Jackson’s jewelry from the Super Bowl. A devotional form retooled for Baltimore.

MALCOLM: And the pads... they’re a soft echo of Richard Serra. His Tilted Arc was meant to hide surveillance; ours shows what usually stays private, the post-workout locker-room gestures repeated until they turn sculptural. Serra, but gayer.

DAN: The behavior we design isn’t abstract (we draw on your experience); it’s in the touch, the lean, the glance. It’s in how people adjust themselves inside something reflective. We were thinking about how the physical becomes visual, and how image becomes touch again. Gum on stools, sweat printed on light boxes, embedded graffiti.

MALCOLM: We kept coming back to this idea that feeling is a kind of behavior; behavior rendered as a gesture or suggestion. Not a confession, but a way of moving, a rhythm. The park holds that... the repetition, the strain, the form learning itself.

DAN: It’s also about proximity. Between bodies, generations, even between seeing and being seen. Like manners, vulnerability becomes a kind of public currency here.

MALCOLM: Yeah, it’s a place where you can practice feeling in public; not to perform, but to stay in the rehearsal, the forever present.