I've always wanted to feature one of their projects on my weekly page, but MoCo Loco has beaten me to the punch with a post on the artists and the Bioscleave House.
This house, like Yoro Park in Japan, is an attempt at finding a physical means of expressing their ideas. Where the novelty of their ideas and projects fits the playfulness of a public park, pulling off a residential commission must have been difficult, requiring a client with an open and understanding mind. Regardless, Yoro Park actually features a house, not an inhabited house but a potential house that people can experience, perhaps a blueprint for Bioscleave.
Click for larger, expanded image.
Where the Yoro's Destiny House features such oddities as walls bisecting rooms and its furniture, the Bioscleave House seems a bit more tame. The plan illustrates a living area in the center of the house that is like a landscape, open and full of contours. This landscape gives way to more traditional, flat-floored spaces (bedrooms, study, bathroom) that just from the main mass. Unlike a house on one level (ore even a two-story house linked by a stair), this house should make the occupants well aware of their paths through and across the spaces, perhaps training them for immortality...or at least a greater understanding of human/environment interaction.
The house on Long Island is currently under construction.
Links:
- Reversible Destiny, Arakawa + Gins' homepage.
- Site of Reversible Destiny, Yoro Park's official page.
- Architecture Against Death, Interface Journal's three-part issue on the duo. (Text available in PDF via Arakawa + Gins' page; Part I, Part II)
- The Slought Foundation's recent exhibition on the artists.
Now this is a professional looking blog!
ReplyDeleteInteresting house. The living spaces are like a landscape with private pavillions for sleeping, The physical presence of the thing appears to be dog-ugly however and they seem reluctant to show it. Ugly may not be a recognized or valued quality in their esthetic.
ReplyDeleteThis is a comment from Andrew McNair accidentally posted in the wrong place:
ReplyDelete"The Biosclveae House II was finished last fall after it was stopped by the client who ran out of money, and patience. She tried for 1 1/2 years to sell it, nobody would buy it, so she decided to tear it down totally; it was sscheduled for dem c Dec 12th, 2007; but I offered to A/Gins to find a fast buyer to save it; the client said om you have 2 weeks, she had paid a deposit to the Demo Contractor and determined to blitz it; I found a buyer, but A/Gins decided to buy it wtih a "Professor's Group" of investors from Chicago and with what I think was their money too; the Demo was stopped, the hosue sold, and A/Gins finished it over a year of work in 2007; it was done by December 1, 2007; now threy are trying to sell it, but the market has crashed and gone flat, so it sits empty and unused.
by Andrew MacNair, NY NY, 2/22/2009"