Architectural Body

This manifesto is a verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another.: This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry, Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work - museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections - that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms ""human"" and ""being."" When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe, The authors explain that ""Another way to read reversible destiny...is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility."" Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression.

Arakawa is an architect and artist, and Madeline Gins is a poet and novelist. Their work has been exhibited internationally at major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art. Arakawa and Gins have a house under construction for a client in East Hampton, New York, and have recently received a commission to build a community of several hundred residential units in central Japan. Both live in New York where they continue to make ""reversible destiny"" central to their offorts.