Madeline Gins (1941 - 2014)

On January 8 Madeline Gins, an artist, architect, poet, and partner with the late Arakawa in the Reversible Destiny Foundation, died at the age of 72. Even in the early days of the duo's artistic collaboration, it was clear that their ideas on mortality were architectural. Summed up to a degree in their 1997 Guggenheim exhibition "We Have Decided Not To Die," Arakawa (who died in 2010 at the age of 73) and Gins proposed that architectural design could help suspend death (without completely obliterating it) through environments that require a constant reconfiguring of the body. In other words, flat and familiar surfaces and spaces were eschewed in favor of bumps and unexpected configurations.

Subsequent to the major exhibition, Arakawa and Gins were able to realize their "procedural architecture" at full scale, most notably in the Yoro Park ("Site of Reversible" Destiny") in Gifu, Japan (1996); the Bioscleave House in East Hampton, New York (2008); and the Reversible Destiny Lofts in Tokyo (2005).