# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// The Reversible Destiny Archives
Published
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.
Drawing for Reversible Destiny Healing Fun House
Isle of Reversible Destiny – Fukuoka
Sensorium City (Tokyo Bay 1994)
Sensorium City (Tokyo Bay 1994)
Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka In Memory of Helen Keller
Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka In Memory of Helen Keller
