Steel & Sweat: The Interwar Architecture of Domestic Fitness Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Imene Aida Merzougui University of Westminster London | UK Steel & Sweat is an investigation into how European modern architects engaged with the ideas, aesthetics and practices of physical culture in the interwar period. In this study, bodybuilding equipment is analysed as a specialised architectural apparatus that shaped homes and their functions. Interwar modernist architecture is read as a biopolitical project, in which the rooms of the home actively disciplined, cultivated, and displayed the fit body.Tubular steel forms the material thread of this study as it moved from the gymnasium to the luxury of the bourgeois dwelling in the hands of Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, and their contemporaries. It carries both the efficiency of the machine age and the status of the avant-garde interior. Drawing on the interwar bodybuilding press, principally the French periodical La Culture Physique, and on architectural literature of the time, the dissertation maps a transnational network of architects, doctors, and bodybuilders working across France, Germany, and the United States.The dissertation is organised room by room, following domestic fitness through the different spaces in the home where it was practised. The bathroom, where early hygienist concerns embedded bodily regulation into private space; the bedroom, where Joseph Pilates’s Bednasium apparatus turned a space of rest into a productive site; the living room, where physical culture became a vehicle of social performance. Architects championed domestic fitness as a liberating ideal, while the interiors that realised it remained exclusive commodities, a tension that persists wherever the disciplined body reads as a signifier of class and taste. Tutor(s) Davide Deriu