"After all this back-and-forth about the title for
this book.Have we ended up with the right one?"
"If only readers could come to it having some sense
of what an architectural body is."
"What was our last other choice for a title?"
"Constructing life."
"We couldn't take it as the title because our work
has more to do with recasting or reconfiguring life than
with an out-and-out constructing of it."
"We wanted it because it signaled the connection between
what we do and work being done in the fields of self-organization,autopoiesis,artificial
life,and consciousness studies."
"The direction is the same.We're on the same avenue.Even
so,we're doing something quite different."
"Should we spell out the differences?"
"Not this time around."
MADELINE GINS
and ARAKAWA
EARLY
PRAISE FOR Architectural Body
"I have nothing to lose by going along with you.Should
you turn out to be right about reversible destiniy that
will be great for me and if you are not then I will suffer
no worse a fate than would have befallen me otherwise."
-Arthur Danto,philosopher and author of The Madonna
of the future:Essay in a Pluralistic Art World
Columbia University
"This book-I am completely knocked out by it."
-Aaron Kunin,poet and novelist
John Hopkins University
"A poetic-philosophical masterpiece.A moral,anti-metaphycal
illumination.Gins and Arakawa have extended Spinoza's insight
that the body has no limits to emerge with a maximal architecture,an
architecture in the visionary mode of hejdukTaut,and Schwitters.Their
radical housing project is a severe polemic against the
elegiac Westen tradition and its memorials.In an anti-Virgilian
mode in which everything immortal touches the mind,they
propose exigent structures against death."
-David Shapiro,art historian,poet,and author of Lateness
Cooper Union
"Together with Norberg-Schulz's Intentions in Architecture
and Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,this
work should be counted among the handful of seminal and
iconoclastic contemporary studies that open up and redefice
the field of architecture."
-Andrew MacNair,architect
Columbia University
"From
Plato to Heidegger,from an archiectonics of the cosmic demiurge
to a post-metaphysical analysis of building,dwelling,and thinking,architecture
has been conceived as housing for those who die.Arakawa and
Gins ask the question,why not construct for those who will
continue to live? This is the manifesto of a transhuman architecture,a
called for a daring,practical,fully embodied art of living."
-Gary Shapiro,philosopher and author of Archeologies
of Vision:Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying
University of Richmond
"The first 21st century reconception of human life...[and]
a program of expanding human potential on a scale not seen
since the Enlightenment."
-Stanley Shostak,biologist and author of Becoming Immortal
University of Pittsburgh
"The world may not be precisely ready for this,but
these propitious blueprints are absolutely necessary."
-Lissa Wolsak,poet,metal smith,and author of Pen
Chants.
"Gins and Arakawa know that organism and environment
are not two but one single interaction process open to unfathomed
possibilities of novelty on both sides."
-Eugene Gendlin,philosopher,psychologist,and author
of Focusing
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARABAMA PRESS
TUSCALOOSA.ALABAMA 35487-0380
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