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Reversible Destiny - Arakawa / Gins
Over the last three decades, Arakawa (Shusaku Arakawa, b. 1936) and Madeline Gins (b. 1941) have created a remarkable body of work that bridges disciplines and seeks to expand the definition of artistic practice. This volume, published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, features two important collaborations, The Mechanism of Meaning, 1963-73, 1996, and their "reversible destiny" architecture projects, begun in 1971.
323 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 15, 2010
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I still remember the first time I had an architecture critique. As a sort of art school drop out, I'm familiar with the presentation critique process - you expect awkward silence from your peers, conceptual bashing from your tutor (even if you're a philosophy major your conceptual idea will never be good enough) and hopefully some critical feedback from an actual practitioner.
So the first thing I noticed about my first guest Architecture critique was that he looked surprisingly healthy and awake at 9am on a Wednesday (as opposed to the majority of architecture students with shaky hands and zombie eyes form staring at the screen for over 24 hours). He introduced himself as an 'architectural philosopher' and I thought 'cool, so he's both an architect and a philosopher, how postmodern'. When it was my turn for the critique he looked at my panels of print-outs with a confused expression. He stood there in silence for almost 5 minutes before finally saying 'hmm....interesting'. After that, he spent roughly 30 seconds explaining 'interesting' means 'not being bored when you look at something'. That was all he said with my work.
In a way my opinion of Arakawa and Gins is similar to my critic. It's not necessarily thought provoking or constructive, yet you feel like they're almost onto something revolutionary in terms of architectural theory. Arakawa and Gins tackled architecture in a very unique sense of 'motion' and 'body' through linking them with the idea 'we refuse to die'. It's about reversing the inevitable aging process of a structure by prolonging a user's experience of time through it, at least that's how I interpret it. In theory it sounds refreshing and ambitious, but in practice the designs literally are a mess. Megastructures of piled up panels and maze like circulation are meant to delay death? Their idea is that if you spend 5 hours instead of 2 minutes to travel across a room, ultimately your perception of time would be altered to a point where you would be suspended in it. This is largely architecture for the archietcts' ego.
Reversible destiny as a concept is 'interesting' but there's nothing much beyond that. Part of my apathy is due to their inability to communicate the conceptual basis. The graphics are dated and renderings look like early prototypes of Sketch Up. Your lack of Rhino or 3D Max is not an excuse, it can easily be substitute by physical models, drawings, even paper cut outs if you have to. In the end, Reversible Destiny is comparable to the generic sketch up renders - cold, technical and distant. When you look at it all you can see is that it's unusual, you can't get excited about it, you definitely do want want to live in a structure like it, it doesn't even connect or resonate with anything or anyone. Maybe Arakawa and Gins are ahead of our time and that I simply can't see the aesthetic of their projects, but even a theorist has to acknowledge that user participation is inseparable from architecture. But hey, they actually got funding for it, so I guess someone on the council is smarter than me, or at least has a better understanding of a pile of random sticks stacked together.
I still remember the first time I had an architecture critique. As a sort of art school drop out, I'm familiar with the presentation critique process - you expect awkward silence from your peers, conceptual bashing from your tutor (even if you're a philosophy major your conceptual idea will never be good enough) and hopefully some critical feedback from an actual practitioner.
So the first thing I noticed about my first guest Architecture critique was that he looked surprisingly healthy and awake at 9am on a Wednesday (as opposed to the majority of architecture students with shaky hands and zombie eyes form staring at the screen for over 24 hours). He introduced himself as an 'architectural philosopher' and I thought 'cool, so he's both an architect and a philosopher, how postmodern'. When it was my turn for the critique he looked at my panels of print-outs with a confused expression. He stood there in silence for almost 5 minutes before finally saying 'hmm....interesting'. After that, he spent roughly 30 seconds explaining 'interesting' means 'not being bored when you look at something'. That was all he said with my work.
In a way my opinion of Arakawa and Gins is similar to my critic. It's not necessarily thought provoking or constructive, yet you feel like they're almost onto something revolutionary in terms of architectural theory. Arakawa and Gins tackled architecture in a very unique sense of 'motion' and 'body' through linking them with the idea 'we refuse to die'. It's about reversing the inevitable aging process of a structure by prolonging a user's experience of time through it, at least that's how I interpret it. In theory it sounds refreshing and ambitious, but in practice the designs literally are a mess. Megastructures of piled up panels and maze like circulation are meant to delay death? Their idea is that if you spend 5 hours instead of 2 minutes to travel across a room, ultimately your perception of time would be altered to a point where you would be suspended in it. This is largely architecture for the archietcts' ego.
Reversible destiny as a concept is 'interesting' but there's nothing much beyond that. Part of my apathy is due to their inability to communicate the conceptual basis. The graphics are dated and renderings look like early prototypes of Sketch Up. Your lack of Rhino or 3D Max is not an excuse, it can easily be substitute by physical models, drawings, even paper cut outs if you have to. In the end, Reversible Destiny is comparable to the generic sketch up renders - cold, technical and distant. When you look at it all you can see is that it's unusual, you can't get excited about it, you definitely do want want to live in a structure like it, it doesn't even connect or resonate with anything or anyone. Maybe Arakawa and Gins are ahead of our time and that I simply can't see the aesthetic of their projects, but even a theorist has to acknowledge that user participation is inseparable from architecture. But hey, they actually got funding for it, so I guess someone on the council is smarter than me, or at least has a better understanding of a pile of random sticks stacked together.
Displaying 1 of 1 review