Conceptual architect, poet and painter

1941-2014

MADELINE Gins, who has died at the age of 72, was a poet and painter who, with her husband Arakawa, a Japanese-born conceptual artist, set out to achieve everlasting life through architecture, designing structures that they claimed would “counteract the usual human destiny of having to die”.

Their work was premised on the idea that people degenerate and die because they live in surroundings that are too comfortable. The Arakawa-Gins solution was to create homes that leave the occupants feeling disoriented, dizzy and slightly bilious.

“People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline,” Arakawa said. “They should be in an environment that stimulates their senses.”

Their philosophy, which they branded “reversible destiny”, resulted in designs whereby floors undulate like sand dunes; kitchens are at the bottom of steep slopes; windows are too high or too low to look out of; doors are missing, allowing no privacy; electric sockets and switches are in unexpected places on the walls, and the whole is painted in dozens of clashing colours.

Their ideas remained largely theoretical until 2005, when they unveiled the Reversible Destiny Lofts in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka. Each flat features a dining room with a warped floor, making it impossible to install furniture. “You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall,” observed one visitor. “Even worse, there’s no cupboard space.”

But to Gins and Arakawa such inconveniences were precisely the point. “[It] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” explained Arakawa. Some apartments even found tenants.

Madeline Helen Gins was born in New York City on November 7 1941 and read physics and Eastern philosophy at Barnard College in the city. She later enrolled at Brooklyn Museum Art School, where she met Arakawa.

Gins and her husband’s dreams were scuppered in 2008 when they lost their life savings, which they had invested with the fraudster Bernard Madoff. Arakawa died two years later.

Gins succumbed to cancer. — © The