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Architecture Against Death
Shusaku Arakawa, Madeline Gins
November 20-January 31, 2005
Slought Foundation
Reception on Saturday, November 20, 2004
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Slought Foundation, an organization rethinking contemporary arts, presents “Architecture Against Death,” an installation by Arakawa + Gins from November 20, 2004 to January 31, 2005. An installation featuring texts and architectural renderings by Arakawa + Gins, including “Architecture Against Death,” a manifesto by Arakawa + Gins, and “The Tense of Architecture,” by philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle. "Architecture Against Death" provides directions for architectural procedure invention and assembly, and encourages, in the words of Arakawa + Gins, the re-arrangement of landing sites so as to cultivate architectural bodies and the transhuman.
This installation has been organized in conjunction with a special double issue of the journal Interfaces devoted to their work (June 2004, Issues #21 and #22), edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté.
Arakawa + Gins recently contributed "Living Body Museumeum," an architectural proposal and manifesto, to "Cities WIthout Citizens," co-published by Slought Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and edited by Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy. Both publications are available for purchase and perusal at Slought Foundation.
From the introduction to Interfaces by Jean-Michel Rabaté:
"When in 1966 Foucault published his philosophical survey of the origins of the modern age, the surprisingly best-selling book The Order of Things which concluded with a few ominous sentences announcing the “end of man,” the apocalyptic tone of his final predictions was greeted with incomprehension and dismay. Almost half a century later, and in the context of Arakawa’s and Gin’s strenuous effort to rethink concretely and dynamically the foundations of what makes us “human beings,” Foucault’s words have not lost their relevance. [...]
What Arakawa and Gins have done for forty years now has been to act upon Foucault’s admonitions by investigating the conditions of possibility of a new episteme that would take stock of the exhaustion of the old humanistic paradigm. This paradigm was defined by the promotion of “man” as an object of action and knowledge, man taken in the dimension of a mortal being whose authenticity was determined and conditioned by a singular relation to death. Since the beginning of Aristotelian logic, we have been taught to reason on the various ways in which we may be concerned by the fact that Socrates is mortal. Precisely by starting at the root and negating the “major” of such an apparent truism, Arakawa and Gins immediately launch a complex re-arrangement of knowledge that is capable of taking in technological advances that have marked our new century. Their revisionist re-definition of man in this post-human(istic) state is tantamount to launching a scientific revolution, if not a revolution tout court. [...] For Arakawa and Gins, the revolution that matters is a revolution in thought, and it will ineluctably be brought about by the creation of a new logic of sense and the senses."
Since 1963, artists-architects-poets Arakawa and Madeline Gins have worked in collaboration to produce visionary, boundary-defying art and architecture. Their seminal work, The Mechanism of Meaning, has been exhibited widely throughout the world. A sequel to that, To Not To Die, appeared in 1987. Gins and Arakawa have exhibited jointly throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States. Their exhibition, "Site of Reversible Destiny," was on view at the Guggenheim Museum Soho in December 1997 and won the College Art Association’s Exhibition of the Year award. Arakawa’s large-scale paintings are in the permanent collections of museums throughout the world. Gins’s published works include the avantgarde classic, What the President Will Say or Do!!, and an innovative arthistorical novel, Helen Keller or Arakawa.
In 1987, as a means of financing the design and construction of works of procedural architecture that draw on The Mechanism of Meaning, extending its theoretical implications into the environment, Arakawa and Gins founded the Architectural Body Research Foundation. The Foundation actively collaborates with leading practitioners in a wide-range of disciplines including, but not limited to, experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, and medicine. Architectural projects have included residences (Reversible Destiny Houses, Bioscleave House, Shidami Resource Recycling Model House), parks (Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro) and plans for housing complexes and neighborhoods (Isle of Reversible Destiny-Venice and Isle of Reversible Destiny-Fukuoka, Sensorium City, Tokyo).
Opened in October 1995, the Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro Park is an "experience park" conceived
on the theme of encountering the unexpected. By guiding visitors through various unexpected
experiences as they walk through its component areas, the Site offers them opportunities to rethink
their physical and spiritual orientation to the world. Online at: http://www.yoro-park.com/e/rev/
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of Architectural Body Research Foundation and the journal Interfaces
 
Organized by
Jean-Michel Rabaté, Aaron Levy
MLA Style:
Shusaku Arakawa, et al. "Architecture Against Death." Slought Foundation Online Content. [20 November 2004;
Accessed 18 May 2013]. <http://slought.org/content/11237/>.
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