
The House Where You Live Forever: The Reversible Destiny of Madeline Gins - tintinnabula
https://blog.longreads.com/2016/08/16/the-house-where-you-live-forever/#
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nprescott
I wanted to like something about this, if for no other reason than the title
(which is excellent). The writing is good but I think the author gives too
much credit to Gins and couches the whole thing to sound like "maybe she knew
something that we don't" and leaves any substantive criticism to the reader.

As someone wholly unfamiliar with avant-garde architecture each of the
pictured examples looks garish or camp in the extreme, like a 1960's
television set. This can be put down to my inexpert eye but for the fact that
the architect offers the following:

    
    
      What about consciousness at the cellular level, or at the level of the entire
      population? Might those types of awareness affect a person’s ability to live
      forever? The need to target different “scales of action,” as Gins called
      them, was reinforced in her dreams.
    

And the author supplies:

    
    
      I didn’t understand how Gins could have thought that following these
      instructions might lead to immortality. But I also couldn’t believe, based on
      all I knew of her, that she was anything less than serious about the intent
      of her work.
    

To be blunt, the whole article read like a weakly supportive retrospective on
some kind of metaphysical woo-woo. The author is clearly talented, but the
subject matter was _way_ outside of my wheelhouse and left me annoyed.

------
ars
Could someone summarize this and tell me if it's worth reading?

Because in my quick skim it seems like they want to make people live forever
by using strange looking architecture?!?!?

~~~
abcanthur
As someone who recently spent 4 years in architecture school, Gins (and
Arakawa) were some of the few practitioners of nominal fame who were truly
pursuing something different in architecture. That their primary goal is
plausibly impossible did not make their active principles any less rigorous
than the agendas of more widely accepted conceptual architects. I think it's
worth the read, if only to hear that an architect can actually concern
themselves with the well-being of their users vs the visual impact of their
design. In HM terms, are they guilty of over promising? Absolutely, but they
were seeking a new paradigm, not just iterating to get to their next series of
financing.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
>That their primary goal is plausibly impossible did not make their active
principles any less rigorous than the agendas of more widely accepted
conceptual architects.

It's not about "active principles" so much as the fact that - after economics
- no other profession manages to maintain social status while promoting such
obvious, unquestionable crankery and/or snake oil.

>I think it's worth the read, if only to hear that an architect can actually
concern themselves with the well-being of their users vs the visual impact of
their design.

And the irony is that when they were done, all they had was visual impact and
rhetoric, and no evidence of improvements in well-being.

The visual impact is distinctive. The Mitaka Lofts look pretty cool from the
outside (maybe not so much on the inside though.)

But all the nonsense about life extension, "reverse destiny", and links to the
immune system is just such obvious bullshit you have to wonder how it was ever
taken seriously.

It's self-evident that architecture is important to health and well-being on
all kinds of levels.

But it often seem that at some point 20th century arts threw all criticism out
of the window and started giving a pass to almost any academic-sounding
rhetoric, no matter how nonsensical. (Maybe all the ornamentation moved from
buildings to text?)

Unfortunately stating boldly that you're dealing with an issue _doesn 't mean
you actually are_ \- even less that you're dealing with it with insight and
effectiveness.

