Reversible Destiny Lofts - Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller)

REVERSIBLE DESTINY LOFTS - MITAKA (IN MEMORY OF HELEN KELLER)

The nine-unit multiple dwelling Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller) marks a new point in history, in the history of human dwelling. This first completed example of procedural architecture put to residential use offers a whole new approach to home sweet home. Procedural architecture is an architecture of precision and unending invention. Works of procedural architecture function as well-tooled pieces of equipment that help the body organize its thoughts and actions to a greater degree than had previously been thought possible. These lofts address and reframe, right in the midst of the workaday world, what have thus-far been intractable philosophical problems, even at times giving rise to possible solutions. Set up to put fruitfully into question all that goes on within them, they steer residents to examine minutely the actions they take and to reconsider and, as it were, recalibrate their equanimity and self-possession, causing them to doubt themselves long enough to find a way to reinvent themselves. These tactically posed architectural volumes put human organisms on the track of why they are as they are. To be sure, every loft comes with a set of directions for use.

The living body is in desperate need of an architectural context within which to demonstrate right on the spot its capabilities as a whole, ones already included in its repertoire as well as those still to be discovered or invented. These lofts make vivid to their residents the operative tendencies and coordinating skills essential to and determinative of human thought and behavior; which means to say, they manage, by virtue of how they are constructed, to reveal to their residents the ins and outs of what makes a person tick. This is the same set of tendencies and skills to which Arakawa and Madeline Gins, the artists-architects responsible for Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller), gave diagrammatic form in their decades-long research project The Mechanism of Meaning.

By virtue of how it is constructed, through how its elements and features are juxtaposed, the Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller) invites optimistic and constructive action. What could be more optimistic and constructive than a living space that in every way both prods and coaxes its residents to continue living for an indefinitely long period of time?! That is what the term reversible destiny signals loudly and clearly. Each reversible destiny loft has structured into it the capacity to help residents live long and ample lives.

Reversible Destiny Lofts - Mitaka

Tokyo, Japan

Completed October 2005

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