Water Street Athletics

WSA is the building downtown New York talks about, seventy-two floors across 161 Water Street and 180 Maiden Lane turned into a campus of studios, galleries, restaurants and creative offices. It has become the place fashion and art come to after dark, from the AprèsMET party on Met Gala night to Rhizome World and the Free Arts NYC gala, and the athletics floor had to belong in that company as much as any gallery or restaurant in the building.

Protean Sports took the vertical from an empty floor to a fully open facility, with a strength floor of competition racks and lifting platforms, a conditioning floor of bikes, rowers, ski ergs and curved treadmills running the length of the windows, a boxing area, and studios for reformer Pilates, yoga and meditation alongside rooms for recovery and bodywork.

Every piece of equipment was specified for the way serious athletes train, and the look was built to sit with the rest of WSA, from the WSA-branded pads on the racks to the timber floors and the light off the river at the end of the day.

Design and function references in their very origin drew from the sporting culture that belongs to the city itself, and in particular New York's rich history of boxing, from the Golden Gloves to the great fight nights at Madison Square Garden and the gyms that trained generations of fighters. That heritage is integrated into the space through a dedicated boxing area and visual references to the classic New York fight gym, so members train with the city's sporting history and boxing talent around them.

The gym and wellness team was curated as carefully as the space, bringing together a selection of New York's finest talent and its most accomplished movement experts across fitness, reformer Pilates, meditation and human movement, so members have the best of the city under one roof.

The roster included trainer Marty Kelly, professional boxer Emmet Brennan, reformer Pilates teacher Stefani Bertoncini and meditation teacher Manoj Dias.

Protean Sports created and integrated an athlete programme at Water Street Athletics for professionals who live in New York City or travel through it. This gives members a money-can't-buy, front-row seat to an exclusive training environment where standards are delivered at their highest, and where athletes feel safe to integrate throughout, knowing that every member brings the same level of excellence across the other cultural silos in the building.

The roster is curated and controlled by Protean Sports, and so is the standard of entry, which is judged on performance and in equal measure on cultural fit, so every athlete who trains there is someone WSA would choose to be associated with.

The WSA run club takes the programme out through the streets and courts of Lower Manhattan, and back inside the timetable runs from yoga and reformer Pilates in the studios to strength, conditioning and boxing on the floor, so the programme reaches well beyond its own walls.