The House Where You Live Forever: The Reversible Destiny of Madeline Gins | Hacker News Reader

The House Where You Live Forever: The Reversible Destiny of Madeline Gins

blog.longreads.com

27 pointstintinnabula6 comments

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.

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?!?!?

From the article:

> ' Gins often said that the reason she and Arakawa made art and architecture was to “construct optimism.” Their whole philosophy began there, in the desire to embrace being alive and to shift their focus away from the certainty of death. Gins made the choice to believe that art, and her work, were strong enough to do that. It was her version of faith, and her work made that faith solid, physical. Her life, like all our lives, was often filled with sadness and difficulty. There were periods of depression, anxiety, sick parents, financial problems, her husband’s illness and death. Through it all, she insisted not just on continuing to live, but on living forever. Trying to build a world where fewer people suffered made her own suffering bearable. A year and a half after Arakawa’s death, Gins recalled in a letter to a friend her struggle to move forward. “Despite my shattered state,” she wrote, “in spite of the gaping hole that had been punched into my optimism, I asserted that nothing is of more interest than to be alive.” '

It's a poetic and apocryphal tale of optimism. Not a bad read if you enjoy art.

I agree. I think this is one flaw of HN's "just the link" style combined with the long form article movement. Yes, I like more in-depth reads and I appreciate a well-written introduction but I'd at least like a hint what these supposed 28 minutes of reading are about.

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.

>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.

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