Architecture has been a way to immortalise and to honour death. From the Egyptian pyramids to war memorials, architecture and design have forever been dedicated to death. But Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins sought to allow their inhabitants eternal life through their design.
The 1960s New York conceptual artists and self-taught architects saw death as the ultimate design flaw. Their philosophy, Reversible Destiny, claimed that living too comfortably was fatal to the human condition and that humans should live in a constant state of instability.
ST Luk, project manager at Arakawa and Gins’s New York-based Reversible Destiny Foundation said “Our bodies are conditioned by our surrounding environments and our architecture, and we naturally adapt to whatever space we are given. Once you feel comfortable, your body begins to deteriorate. The architecture basically tries to keep you from fully adapting to it.”
Defying every architectural convention and creating pieces that can only be described as a maximalist eye-sore, their designs contradict the idea that a peaceful environment in the home is essential to help unwind and sleep better. They make use of asymmetry, constantly shifting levels, bright clashing colours and an almost total absence of right angles.
The constant change in dimension and elevation can be extremely disorienting, making you feel like a giant or an ant. It forces the inhabitants to constantly adapt, adjust and process their environments.
Arakawa, who moved to New York in 1961, was already an established conceptual artist in Japan—his work was a watershed for post-war Japanese avant-garde, producing pieces such as a socio-political installation criticising the bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two years later, in 1963 he met Long-Island-born Gins at the Brooklyn museum art school. Gin’s medium was text: experimental poetry and books that challenged readers’ concepts and ideas of language and form. They soon married and made their work as collaborators, moving away from their traditional mediums and exploring humans’ interaction with space, led to the creation of the Reversible Destiny Foundation in 1987.
Nobu Yamaoka, a filmmaker who lived in unit 201 designed by Arakawa and Gin between 2006-10 with his wife and two children explores Reversible Destiny in his documentary ‘Children Won’t Die’. He says that it forever changed him, both physically and emotionally. The constant stimulus of merely living in the space was like practicing yoga; in the first few months, he lost weight, felt more energetic and was no longer bothered by hay fever. Moving into a conventional home with muted colours, level floors and flat walls after living in Gins and Arakawa’s work was enervating.
Ironically, as they do not belong to a particular school and neither were trained as architects, architecture students rarely encounter them in their courses.
Though they might not have yet unlocked the secret to immortality, the couple’s refreshingly disorienting structures and untraditional methods make every day at home a day of discovery.
