A Beautiful Portrait of the Visionary Madeline Gins

At the Awl, journalist Amelia Schonbek devotes tremendous energy to a portrait of the astounding architect, writer, poet, and visionary Madeline Gins (1941–2014), who co-founded (with Shusaku Arakawa) the Reversible Destiny Foundation. “You know, I have huge responsibilities,” Gins said to Schonbek in 2013. “Pressing ones.” "Most architects generally want to design comfortable, visually interesting buildings for their clients. Gins found that aspiration boring. Instead, her goal was to build spaces that would keep people from dying." More:

According to Gins’s elaborate theory of Reversible Destiny, developed over the course of a forty-five-year collaboration with her husband and artistic partner, Shusaku Arakawa, death may not in fact be inevitable. People are lulled into believing it is because they focus only on what has come before — the “thus-far obligatory downhill course of life,” according to Gins. Their brightly colored, disorienting dreamworlds, which look more like surrealist playgrounds than traditional buildings, are intended to jolt people out of their normal routines and force them to move through life differently. If people are unable to fall back on their physical and mental habits, Gins and Arakawa said, they will be open to new ideas, including the possibility that they can lengthen their lives and, eventually, resist death entirely.

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In late October, in her studio on Houston Street, I asked Gins to explain to me how Reversible Destiny could keep me from dying. In previous conversations, she had skirted the specifics, instead going into long, looping digressions from architecture into philosophy or literature. Work on the Dover Street Market commission was behind schedule, and Gins seemed to have lost weight. But she was brimming with energy. Like a pastor surrounded by potential converts, she viewed any interaction as an opportunity to persuade someone of the necessity of Reversible Destiny. We sat at a large table near the front windows. Arakawa and Gins’s five-thousand-volume library stared down at us from shelves that lined one wall of the room. In describing her work, Gins rapidly pulled ideas from books of philosophy, literary theory, science, art history, disability studies, poetry, and surrealism. Her language, the critic Arthur Danto has written, is like “Einstein as adapted for Wittgenstein by Gertrude Stein.”

In a 2011 letter to Jasper Johns, Gins explained how, when she and Arakawa began working together, they started “cataloging systematically the underlying tendencies of thought and action of a person.” They wanted to understand clearly how people tend to think and act, so they could figure out how to push those boundaries. They were particularly interested in language, realizing that the words people use have the power to paralyze them, or to prevent them from thinking outside the status quo. Taking up a Wittgensteinian idea — “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — they hoped to develop a set of replacement terms for the everyday concepts that had become so overused that they were meaningless. “When we say ‘space,’ we have very little notion of what we’re talking about,” Gins explained. “You get spacey when you mention space. So we substituted ‘landing site.’” Later, they sought to reform standard patterns of movement and thought in the same way.

Read on at the Awl.