Arakawa (1936-2010) and Gins (1941-2014)

In 2010, artists-turned-architects Shūsaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation at their loft and studio on Houston Street in New York, a network for collaborations primarily intended to further their project pursuing immortality through speculative architecture and theoretical inquiries. Created under their provocative mandate ‘we have decided not to die’, these visionary sites of ‘reversible destiny’, implemented in the 1990s and early 2000s, aimed to increase mental and bodily awareness. Their buildings were designed to train the occupant to ‘not die’ through built features including uneven and undulating floors, unusual shifts in scale, and vibrant colour combinations, intended to make the occupant confront their body and senses. 

Arakawa and Gins’ modus was to create environments that demand attention, challenging the senses through constant visual and physical stimulation, compelling us to re-evaluate our world and ourselves. In problematising our bodily states, they suggest, we cannot subsist in stasis or succumb to death. As Gins said, ‘We don’t have to be passive. We can reverse the usual downhill course of things’.

Developed over a five-decade-long creative partnership, Arakawa and Gins’ collective projects encompassed architecture, film, painting, philosophy, poetry and scientific research. Their oeuvre is an odyssey in metamorphosis and mutability – themes the pair would continue to explore throughout their career. Central to their artistic experiments was an underlying questioning of the potential of human perception and experience, and how understanding ourselves as bodies in space can be shaped and reshaped, thought and rethought.

The couple (in both work and life) belonged to the downtown New York art milieu of the 1960s. Arakawa, born in Nagoya, Japan in 1936, attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo where he began his affiliation with the Neo-Dadaist Organizers, the avant-garde group who borrowed from the materials of everyday life to exploit notions of wit and deadpan humour, and elicit participatory performances that made viewers self-aware of the very act of looking. Gins was born in New York in 1941 and, shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1962 with a Physics and Eastern Philosophy degree, turned to experimental fiction and poetry. Arakawa moved to New York in the autumn of 1961 and quickly befriended Marcel Duchamp along with other notable figures including John Cage, and was exhibiting works at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles by 1965. He met Gins in 1962 while taking classes at the former Brooklyn Museum Art School (BMAS), at a time when many seriously questioned socio-cultural and political life in the US. This, paired with the fact that Arakawa was born in the recent aftermath of the Second World War, alludes to their collaborative efforts to construct a more optimistic version of the world, one that bridged the discourse of conceptual art with the rhetoric of Dadaism and philosophical investigations into phenomenology, linguistics and cognition.

Through their independent practices – Arakawa as a conceptual artist turned painter and Gins as an experimental writer – both explored signification through the use of words and symbols, and sought to push possibilities in art and language. Arakawa’s early paintings challenge the capacity of cognition and many already reference architectural elements, such as highly schematic imagery, that suggest blueprints and diagrams, including the windows depicted in his Alphabet Skin (1965-66). In her books, poems and scripts, including her first two publications WORD RAIN (or a Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) from 1969 and What the President Will Say and Do!! in 1984, Gins employed linguistic stunts and playful typographic treatments to explore philosophical issues within an activated space between reader and author. 

A concern for sensorial and perceptual stimulation is evident in their first truly collaborative project, begun in 1963. The Mechanism of Meaning is a collection of 83 mixed-media, human-sized puzzle-panels, proposing a series of visual, language, and thought exercises, many of them requiring physical interaction to test the automatic ways in which people perceive their surroundings. Intended to shape our cognitive apparatus, The Mechanism of Meaning anticipates later works by Arakawa and Gins that became increasingly spatial, going from the page to three dimensions, and eventually to the realm of architecture. In 1969, Arakawa and Gins contributed to guerrilla literary and art project Street Works IV, creating artworks on the pavements of Manhattan; Arakawa planned to ‘remove the Empire State Building and place it in front of the Architectural League’. 

Forgoing traditional notions of comfort and convenience, their work intended to confront the physical body with corporeal and mental challenges in an attempt to multiply the ways the body interacts with architecture. Their first consideration of architectural space at full-scale was in 1983 with Container for Mind-Blank-Body, an unrealised proposal for the Venetian island Madonna del Monte. The project lives on as extraordinary exploratory drawings, which illustrate the sequence of different sensorial units one would pass through, featuring undulating topography, walls to be walked through, and trench-like passageways to confront the body’s limitations.

‘Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body, aiding in the structuring of the self’ 

Many of these elements can be found at Yoro Park in Gifu, Japan; this 18,000m² urban experiment from 1995 is an elliptical public space known for its tilted terrain and conceptual sculptures. In Critical Resemblance House, one of the park’s buildings, a maze of walls bisect everyday items such as a bath, chair or toilet, questioning how we define objects and their respective functions. The potential for the reassignment of meanings and experiences is also central to Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, one of three large-scale permanent installations at Arata Isozaki’s Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Okayama. Realised in 1994, the capsule-shaped installation is also Arakawa and Gins’ first permanent architectural work; two replicas of the Ryoanji Garden in Kyoto affixed to the walls mirror one another while a see-saw appears on the floor and ceiling in different scales, toying with our perceptions and causing a sense of dislocation. Two residential projects, Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka in Tokyo from 2005 and Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) in East Hampton, NY, three years later, incorporate multi-coloured spaces – the lofts are rendered in 14 paint colours while Bioscleave has 52. With textured, bumpy floors to stimulate the senses, these two projects allow inhabitants to ‘discover the full potential of the body’. 

These are the only full-scale architecture projects realised in their lifetime, yet they constitute the ideas and methodologies Arakawa and Gins explored throughout their careers, and speak to their ultimate commitment to architecture. As with the duo’s early independent investigations, their radical architectural ethos attempted to systematically undo physical and mental habits in an effort to unsettle automatisms and what they perceived as a complacency with normative behaviours. They saw their architectural projects as strategies for heightened awareness and life-extending experiments, where commonplace sensorial experiences are deliberately denied, and replaced with ‘procedures’ for new ways of thinking and moving in space: a practice conceived to re-educate, or even coerce, the body. Space, time and the self are seen as a dynamic progression of experiences, rather than as one static, concluding experience. 

To transform the mind and body through space, they expanded on diverse discourses, straddling conceptual art, experimental poetry, philosophical inquiry, linguistics, cognition, disability studies, medical research and phenomenology, bringing these pluralistic interests into their architectural projects. Gins once referred to the architectural manifestation of their work as ‘an interactive laboratory for everyday life’. 

Their approach to architecture, like all subjects they pursued, might be best understood as a way to pose questions more than offering precise answers. As Duchamp put painting back ‘in the service of the mind’, Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body. Central to this ideology is the notion that architecture can aid in the structuring of the self. In what could be described as the artists’ architectural treatise, the human form is inseparable from site, as body, person and world are interlaced. Both Arakawa and Gins were independently inspired by American blind-deaf writer Helen Keller. Gins’ genre-bending, multi-person biography, Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994) commingles the lives of the historical figure, the artist Arakawa, as well as the author, Gins, to collapse time, place and identities, and question what constitutes an able body.

In their attempt to radically reshape the conditions of perception, they devised their own set of terms to describe their goals, including ‘architectural body’, articulated in their 2002 manifesto-book of the same name. In it, they describe the reciprocity between body and architecture, and how, through architecture, meaning is created and defined through a process of self-invention.

Later speculative projects were envisioned on an urban scale, including the development of apartment complexes, public housing and plans for entire cities, which live on today as schematic studies, models and digital renderings. Arakawa and Gins brought to these projects similar elements from their past works, including labyrinthine terrains, colourful and volumetric architectures (cubes, spheres, pyramids) and a continued experimentation with programme and space. Of the 2003 unrealised Isle of Reversible Destiny, Fukuoka, Gins wrote: ‘A very natural-appearing engineered terrain, an extremely re-articulated terrain makes it possible for the body and the city to operate conjointly – as much kinaesthetically, proprioceptively, and tactilely as visually.’ Though these projects were never realised, their questioning of what constitutes a body, through an approach to creating designs for the reconstruction of experience, brings their work into proximity with fields such as artificial life research. 

Since their deaths (Arakawa in 2010 and Gins in 2014), many have argued the various interpretations of their work. Some have suggested it was metaphorical provocation. Some believe it was to be taken at face value. Others still offer the idea that the work was about the act of processing, rather than an argument about whether or not they truly believed architecture could reverse death. For Arakawa and Gins, the best way to understand the world (and thus ourselves), is to overturn it as it is. If anything, such an ambitious and experimental undertaking remains their greatest legacy.