Bodies at risk: the architecture of reversible destiny

Reversible Destiny is the first major U.S. exhibition of the collaborative art of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Characterized by genre-defying forms and a presentation that makes enormous demands on the viewer, their work has received little attention in the United States, although they have garnered widespread interest in Europe and Japan. Despite the fantastical, almost cartoonish appearance of many of the images in this exhibit, Arakawa/Gins are quite serious, even cerebral, about the philosophical and ethical commitments of their art. It is to the Guggenheim Museum’s credit that it has been willing to launch an exhibit which dares, however unfashionably, to be difficult.

Figure 1.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Critical Resemblances House, Site of Reversible Destiny—Yoro, 1993-95. Photo: Courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

Figure 2.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Model for Reversible Destiny City, 1993. Cardboard, foamcore, foam, rubber, paint, paper, resin, and Styrofoam, 15 x 75 x 63 inches. Photo: Courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

Figure 3.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Model for Inflected Arcade House, 1991. Basswood, cardboard, paint, plaster, and Styrofoam, 7 x 54 x 48 inches. Photo: Courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

The first floor of the Guggenheim SoHo installation is devoted to Reversible Destiny Architecture (1971-present), displayed as vibrantly colored mural-sized computer-generated images of proposed houses and cities, together with architectural models of many of the proposals. Although they are called houses, one ponders the inhabitability of these structures whose labyrinthine walls, undulating floors, dislocated and dispersed rooms, and collapsed or exploded forms seem to make them unlikely candidates for home sweet home. The designs of Reversible Destiny Architecture and their accompanying descriptive and analytic texts seem to stretch the idea of house, and perhaps architecture itself, near if not beyond the breaking point. Where architecture has traditionally been theorized as providing a secure foundation for human dwelling in the world by defining, ordering, and enclosing spaces, Arakawa/Gins create an architecture that produces spaces for dwelling which are neither defined, ordered, nor enclosed.

The Critical Resemblances House, for example, is built up from levels of non-coinciding labyrinth-derived wall patterns such that various zones of the body encounter various labyrinth segments simultaneously, presenting a seemingly insuperable challenge to movement: “the body is invited to move through composite passageways—rectilinear above, curvilinear below—often in two opposing ways at once.” In this house, Arakawa/Gins point out that “it could take several hours to go from the livingroom to the kitchen. Parts of the kitchen or the livingroom reappear in the bedroom or the bathroom. It might take several days to find everywhere in the house that the diningroom turns up.” The diningroom in another of the houses, the Infancy House, is all in one place but it is a room in name only: the part of the floor plan marked “diningroom” is a passageway built as a series of entrances to the diningroom, such that one enters, then enters again. Suddenly one can enter a room before entering it, and being in the room is indistinguishable from entering the room. These puzzling and ambiguous states are common in the various house designs. In general, reversible destiny houses eschew comfort and convenience in favor of multiplying and complexifying the ways in which the body engages with the architectural surround.

The question one cannot help but repeat before each house design is the question of inhabitability: how could anyone live in such a house? One might conclude that these fanciful designs are radically uninhabitable, and therefore of interest only as clever artifacts, more carnivalesque funhouse than house proper. But perhaps the persistence of the question of inhabitability, if one remains attentive, might remain open: not, “is this house really inhabitable?” but rather “what would it mean to truly inhabit this house? what sort of body/being might be required or produced as this house’s inhabitant?”

From an aesthetic point of view, Reversible Destiny Architecture...