Reversible Destiny: A Look at Architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins
Can your surroundings prolong your life? Can where you live provide you with good health? Can you actually reverse your destiny? According to Architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins, yes, and for 45 years they have been building on the mantra that dying is optional.
Artists, poets, architects Arakawa and Gins met in 1963 and since they began collaborating, they have produced some of the most visionary art and architecture of the 20th and 21 centuries. More than simply designing structures, the pair have also investigated experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, and medicine by way of their Architectural Body Research Foundation founded in 1987. They have authored nine books, most notably, Architectural Body in 2002 and Making Dying Illegal in 2006 and have written countless essays on dying and destiny.
Designing structures that look almost cartoonish, both in shape and color pallets, they could very well fit into a Disney film. These structures have been given the name “bioscleave,” “We assign the new name bioscleave to what others routinely speak of as biosphere, desiring with this simple renaming to keep front and center the dynamic nature of prevailing atmospheric conditions,” said Gins. “The word cleave embedded in bioscleave, having everything to do with the term, cleaving, will serve to remind its users of both the attaching of one segment of mass energy to another and the separating of such segments one from the other.”
The floors are uneven, almost like small hills. The reason behind the unsure footing is to make people use the bodies in way that is slightly abnormal way to maintain equilibrium. This, according to the designers, will stimulate their immune systems causing better overall health. Walls are painted sporadically in 40 or so colors on numerous levels which are meant to provoke the feeling of being on two spaces at the same time. The structures have no interior doors, windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets. All of these design elements are meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.
“We contend that through a carefully worked-out pairing of people with certain surroundings – as of the 21st century, only those of our design – people can be made to be terrifically long-lived, durable beyond belief,” said Gins. “A person allied with surroundings that in magnificent style shores up her existing co-coordinating skills and coaxes into existence new ones ought to be able to escape so-called human destiny, the thus far invariably downhill end course of things. Those who can stay on an even course, avoiding a downhill slide to a tragic ending, managing simply to go on indefinitely, will have built for themselves a reversible destiny.” They present the case for the thoroughgoing joining up of people and their surroundings in their book, Architectural Body, and in the sequel to it, Making Dying Illegal.
According to the pair, within Bioscleave House, a work of procedural architecture, the prevailing conditions of the universe get explicitly put into play. Human beings themselves are of course organized segments of bioscleave. All human capability derives from and is sustained by bioscleave. People communicate directly with and draw upon bioscleave to a large extent through procedural knowing, a term covering both instinctual sequences and encoded knowing, that is, habitual patterns of activity. “Perceiving, walking, talking, and eating, for example, happen as procedural knowing. Acquiring a skill would seem to involve integrating all steps needed for skillfully performing a task and then reducing them to a procedure” said Gins.
While Arakawa and Gins’ theories might seem a bit abstract and innovative, creating a healthy and balanced space to extend ones life is nothing new and has been proven to promote a more tranquil and nourishing life. Feng Shui - which translates to wind water in English - has been in existence for 3000 years and had been proven to promote better health along with inner peace and a tranquil life by way of arranging objects in your home. Even though Arakawa and Gins’ philosophy have yet to be completely proven scientifically, like Feng Shui, it only makes sense that environments will impact our well-being. Said Gins, “A new way to live effectively and to stay alive indefinitely has come into existence at the beginning of the 21st century. Will you do everything within your power to make sure that structures of this nature get built in as timely a fashion as possible so that your contemporaries can rush to make use of them for learning how not to die?”
>Written by d/visible contributor Tony Engelhart.
