Dante A. Ciampaglia

This article was originally published in Metropolis Magazine as "Hip-Hop Architecture's Philip Johnson Moment".

More than 40 years after it emerged from South Bronx house parties, hip-hop has become a once-in-a-lifetime concussive force reshaping global cultural. But at its most elemental and foundational, hip-hop is a direct, powerful confrontation with the built environment. “Broken glass everywhere / People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five rapped on their seminal 1982 track “The Message.” “I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise / Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.”

The Artist-Architects Who Believed Their Psychedelic Designs Would Promote "Death Resistance" - Featured Image — Reversible Destiny Lofts – In Memory of Helen Keller (exterior), Tokyo (2005). Image © 2005 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins; Courtesy Masataka Nakano

This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "These Architects Sought to Solve the Ultimate Human Design Flaw—Death."

Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins—visual artists, conceptual writers, self-taught architects—believed that, through a radical recalibration of the built environment, humans could solve the ultimate design flaw: death. (Your move, Norman Foster.)

Arakawa and Gins completed five projects in their lifetimes—three in Japan, two in America—and to call them unconventional is a gross understatement. There’s an acid trip of a park; an eye-poppingly colorful, plucked-from-Pixar apartment building; and doorless lofts with bumpy, uneven flooring. Rather than whimsy or quirkiness, their ethos—dubbed Reversible Destiny—aimed to seriously promote longevity by activating and stimulating the body and mind.

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Dante A. Ciampaglia •••

How Hip-Hop Architecture is Making its Own Space

The Artist-Architects Who Believed Their Psychedelic Designs Would Promote "Death Resistance"