Category Archives: Arakawa/Gins

Reversible Destiny (Mitaka) Lofts – In Memory of Helen Keller /// Photograph by Shingo Tsuji (2013)

When I visited the Reversible Destiny Foundation‘s Mitaka Lofts (see previous article) in Tokyo last year, I encountered one of its resident, Shingo Tsuji, who is an also an architect (Chiasma Factory) and was kind enough to make me visit his apartment. Since then, we became friends, and I recently “curated” him a small reportage about the details of his life in this particular dwelling. I asked him to take some pictures of his apartment and point out a few significant details that are characteristic to his “reversible destiny” way of life. I feel very lucky as he not only did it with talent but also introduced those fragments of life within the context of Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ lifetime work as well as the various prejudices that often judge it. As you will see, the Reversible Destiny life is not as different as one might think it is from a more “traditional” way of life; nevertheless, the actual difference is crucial and definitely influence both the body and its behavior (mood, inspiration, aura etc.) as you will read along Shingo’s lines.

I take advantage of this post to add that the guest writers essays series will resume in a very near future and that Shingo will be part of the writers that we will be very lucky to be able to read.

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Twice during the last year, I had the great chance to stay over in Reversible Destiny‘s architectures. Along with good friends, we spent the last few days of 2011 at the Bioscleave House in Long Island, and more recently stayed over at the Mitaka Lofts in Tokyo. This is one thing to visit those architectures during the day (see my previous experience at the Bioscleave House through the interview with Madeline Gins), this is another one to actually stay there and therefore confront their uniqueness to our sense of domesticity.

The atypical dwelling that surprises you and amazes you at first becomes a terrain of habits in a second phase. Your body does not need to find its right spot and position anymore, it knows the few places in which it can form an adequate Architectural Body. Climbing a small “hill” to go to the bathroom or to the kitchen when you just woke up puts you in an interesting state of cautious somnambulism. Paradoxically, vision becomes less important in your understanding of space; or rather vision does not register anymore in a hierarchical scheme in which it commands the rest of the body, it becomes an equal part of the sharp awareness of the environment your body builds little by little. Moving in these architectures becomes a dance; not a ballet, of course, but rather something along the lines of Pina Bausch in which stumbling is part of a harmonious movement celebrating the living. Your body is both fragile and strengthen when confronted to the risk it continuously needs to response to. An understanding is always (re)negotiated between this liberated matter and your body which, in this regard, is one step closer to fathom its own material properties.

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The Reversible Destiny Foundation, created and sustained by Madeline Gins and Arakawa, has new online archives on which many of the concepts and projects they invented along the years are being explained and illustrated. As an introduction, I can maybe add the transcript of the interview (part A and part B) I had the luck to do with Madeline Gins about a year ago.

Those archives are very important as they allow to understand the level of engagement radical architecture requires to exist. Despite the condescending smiles I have seen on many faces when I evoke the work of Reversible Destiny, nobody can deny the consistent and passionate efforts that Madeline Gins and Arakawa have been producing for decades, dedicated as they were on a single question. A multitude of diagrams, drawings and texts (see also in their numerous books) analyze what they call the architectural body (the continuous construction of a relationship between a body and its direct material and immaterial surrounding). Such a passionate approach to architecture is exemplary and should be more common. This is not to say that architecture is a vocation to which some kind of transcendental force is leading us, but rather that pleasure and ethics should constitute the foundation of its practice. Architects should never be priests, tyrants or slaves, the representatives of the sad passions as Gilles Deleuze points out when he talks about Spinoza and Nietzsche. On the contrary, they should be the inventors of architectures of joy as I have been already writing about Arakawa and Gins’ work. Those archives are a good starting point to compose such an ethics.

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