Madeline Gins, the architect, artist, and poet who died of cancer on January 8 at the age of 72, would not have wanted an obituary. Her life’s work, including several architectural projects completed during the last 20 years, was devoted to creating buildings and objects that, she said, “reversed destiny” by battling its lowest common denominator, death. An obituary would suggest that Gins and her husband and creative partner, the artist Arakawa, who died in 2010, had failed — they did not. The kind of immortality reserved for Gins, even if its corporal form eluded her, embraces the idiosyncratic ideas and projects she and Arakawa brought to architecture in the early ’90s and into the ’00s, a time when the profession was more interested in generating capital than concepts.
“It’s immoral that people have to die,” Gins said in 2008, when she and Arakawa completed their first North American commission, the Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) in East Hampton, New York. The home features a sunken kitchen at the center of what would otherwise be a living room, were it not completely antithetical to traditional living. The surrounding space, made from a mixture of soil and cement, features small hills and bumps that look more like sand dunes than flooring; walls are painted in more than 30 colors, the windows are installed at varying and uneven heights, and there are no doors anywhere throughout the interior.
The idea in East Hampton, as in Gins and Arakawa’s 1995 Site of Reversible Destiny Park in Yoro, Japan; the 2005 Reversible Destiny Lofts (in Memory of Helen Keller) in Mitaka, just outside Tokyo; and the 2013 Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator inside Dover Street Market New York, is that death could be avoided if only people chose not to die. The disorienting architecture and environments designed by the husband-and-wife team are meant, as Fred A. Bernsteinexplained, “to lead its users into a perpetually ‘tentative’ relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.” The duo intended to disorient the visitor, both in space and linear time. In a profession so obsessed with the idea of “rational living,” Gins understood that the rational conclusion of life is death. By building irrationally, she and Arakawa sought to upend that trajectory.
Gins had no formal training as an architect, but she knew better than many design school alumni that architecture is vastly more complicated than the process of laying glass against concrete. Arakawa and Gins were peerless in their pursuit of an architecture that operated on both theoretical and material levels; they created one of the few truly experimental practices that managed to explore immaterial ideas like mortality and realize them in built form. Their legacy remains without an inheritor. Speaking at the Bioscleave House about architects she and Arakawa have been compared to, Gins remarked, “After this, Gehry, Rem Koolhaas — boring.” She stands to be proven wrong.
Though it’s hard to say whether or not the Bioscleave House is, in fact, a Lifespan Extending Villa — nobody even knows with certainty who owns the house or lives there — the building does grant a degree of the immortality Gins so valiantly sought. Even though its creators may now be dead, the house stands as a monument to the search for both eternity and a more meaningful, eternal architecture.
Click on the slideshow to see images of Arakawa and Gins’s work.
