Architectural Body
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arakawa/Gins as they are known in the visual arts world have never been easy to categorize, as their oeuvre includes experimental poetry (Gins's What the President Will Say and Do!!), phenomenological mind-busters (the seminal conceptual book/installation The Mechanism of Meaning), dense meditations on proprioceptive being (Helen Keller or Arakawa), and their most sustained project, the architectural investigations called Reversible Destiny, which branched off into major shows at the Guggenheim, a few huge coffee-table books and an actual Reversible Destiny city now in construction in Japan. Architectural Body is one of their more approachable, but no less playful, distillations of the concepts. It envisions an individual obtaining control over the very forward movement of one's body through time by permitting architecture to expand the parameters of one's sensorium, even to cling to it so that, literally, one wears one's house like a coat: "ROBERT: But if I'm to be a tent pole or a caryatid, how can I also sit in a chair? ARAKAWA: If we initiate the form, other spines within the surrounding material will kick in and take over... for ten minutes at a time." That this book appears in a series devoted to "poetics" is just: Gins and Arakawa argue for a new language for architecture even new words, such as "coordinology" and "bioscleave" (for biosphere) that is as strange and determined as William Blake's, and as icily postmodern (because they appear to be serious) as Baudrillard, Hakim Bey or the writers associated with Autonomedia. Architectural Body rings as a revolutionary call to personal agency that recalls the heady first years of Surrealism, but with a language that also fits such recent phenomena as the Burning Man festival, though this books feels bigger.
