Has Philippe Starck Jumped the Shark With His Home Gym Office?

Philippe Starck is the poster-boy of design excess--witness this hotel in Beverly Hills--but his latest work stumbles into self-parody. The project, "Home Gym Office" is an attempt to integrate gym equipment into an office environment. It's a decent premise, but his statement about the work sets the alarm bells ringing:

Life is an impossibility carried out. Better perpetuate it. For this we have to love life, to love ourselves at least 15 minutes per day. At home, at work. A few exercises and a good position, elegant obviously

Okaaaay. But the work seals it. Though there are a couple clever features, the stuff looks "designy", and some of it in the worst way--this stuff is pure Sprockets. Take this set of wrist and ankle bracelets. Maybe their a tad better than the puffed out, uncomfortable variety that bobs around on your wrist--but are these designed just for the sake of design? (Those metal studs are meant to be removable weights):

A wall bar for pull ups:

Weights:

That are stackable:

A workout bench:

A heavily weighted "necklace" (for getting a workout while strutting around your office like a bank CEO circa 2006, I suppose):

We'll grant that the adjustable wrist weights are extremely clever, and the system for stacking the weights is actually pretty decent. But that may only exacerbate the pointlessness of the airy-fairy form factor. After all, this is the same man who in 2008 told Die Zeit, a German newspaper, the following:

"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years' time. I want to do something else, but I don't know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself design is a dreadful form of expression."

Maybe Philippe had a change of heart?

Related: Designer Philippe Starck Embraces his Feminine Side [exclusive video]
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[Via Design Boom]