ARAKAWA + GINS: "WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE".
Here's an exquisite catalogue of the project "The Mechanism of Meaning" by Shūsaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, the artists-turned-architects who would become known for their Reversible Destiny Foundation.
With their building designs, which featured uneven and undulating floors, unusual shifts in scale, and vibrant colour combinations, they intended to make the occupant aware of their body, senses, and interaction with the environment. By changing the material conditions of the immediate environment of the home, they suggested, one could just keep on living and "not die."
From the website of the Reversible Destiny Foundation:
"The project The Mechanism of Meaning began in 1963, a year after Arakawa met Madeline Gins for the first time. They saw the work as an open-ended process of research and invention, which as they suggested was: “maybe the first rudimentary compendium of the capabilities (or innate functions) of the mind… …a unique and provocative foray into an uncharted region where art, experience and thought filtered through experience, began to define each other.” Arakawa and Madeline Gins considered The Mechanism of Meaning as the foundation for their philosophy of ‘procedural architecture’ and the buildings they designed and built."
Arakawa died in 2010; Madeline Gins followed four years later, in 2014.
First and only edition (see catalogue for a French edition of this monograph).
