The Power of Architecture: the Site of Reversible Destiny

I have always been drawn to the weird and wonderful but the Site of Reversible Destiny challenges everything I know as art and architecture.

Tucked away from the bustle of big cities hidden in the back corner of Yoro Park in central Japan, this fantastical ‘theme park’ - for lack of better term - is the realisation of Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) and Madeline Gins’ (1941-2014) thirty year old vision. The pair “had a more literal, if whimsical, take on cheating death: The pair purported to believe that their structures could actually allow their inhabitants eternal life.”

Spanning 18,000 square meters the site is home to a number of architectural experiments that’s central concern is the body and “its simultaneously specific and non-specific relation to its surroundings.” The site consists of the Reversible Destiny Yoro Park Memorial which contains a number of writing, diagrams and documentaries to give context to the project; the Critical Resemblance House which is an upside-down, inside-out confusion of a space where the roof is shaped like a map of Gifu Prefecture (central Honshu, Japan’s main island); the Elliptical Field that homes various pavilions - each one reflecting a section of the Critical Resemblance House; alongside 148 paths guiding you through more architectural phenomenas. 

The Site of Reversible Destiny opening in 1995 and has since been coined an ‘experience park’ built upon bodily and psychological encounters. The space takes you on a journey through the unexpected forcing you to re-evaluate and rebuild your relationship to the surroundings. Inspiring child-like explorative behaviour this sensory overload opens up the mind, never before have I seen so many adults running, jumping, or climbing… The instability of the site’s ground has a way of re-enforcing earth’s gravity, reigniting this physical relationship to environment that contrasts the monotonous man-made world we are so accustomed to in the 21st century. 

By far the most challenging aspect of the site is the Critical Resemblance House. With household furniture scattered throughout, both merged within the architecture or protruding over your head or under your feet, the maze’s configuration disorientates and offers a number of “perceptual and cognitive experiences”. You are at once drawn in and pushed out of this architectural abnormality. The Elliptical Field is an enormous basin centred around five maps of the Japanese archipelago. Not exclusive to a number of different bodily experiences: some artistic, some architectural, some cognitive, and some biological — such as the twenty-four species of medicinal herbs planted across the Elliptical Field that evolve the space season by season. 

In 1963 Arakawa and Gins began to work together. Their efforts amalgamated into The Mechanism of Meaning which was published in 1971 and has since been heralded as the first impactful art-science research project exhibited worldwide. Sixteen years later the pair founded the Architectural Body Research Foundation in order to finance the design and materialisation of  procedural architecture (computer graphics techniques that use algorithms to produce scenes) which stems further into the influence of the environment from The Mechanism of Meaning. Before founding the Reversible Destiny Foundation in 2010. 

The Reversible Destiny Foundation is an multi-disciplinary group centred around the same philosophical ideology in which the ‘body’ or ‘persons’ directs their architectural theories. The foundation draws upon not just the arts but “experimental biology, neuroscience, quantum physics, experimental phenomenology, medicine”; this diverse range of fields of study creates space for collaboration and experimentation of the most extreme kind. The Site of Reversible Destiny in Yoro Park is not the only architectural project, others include; Bioscleave House — Lifespan Extending Villa (New York, 2000–2008), Reversible Destiny Houses (Tokyo, 2005), Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body — Nagi Museum Of Contemporary Art (Nagi, 1994). 

I was encouraged to reconsider my physical and spiritual orientation to the world around us and highly recommend emerging yourself in one of Arakawa and Gins architectural sensations — you will never experience anything quite like it. 

The Site of Reversible Destiny: https://www.yoro-park.com/sp/en/facility-map/hantenchi/

The Reversible Destiny Foundation: http://www.reversibledestiny.org/

Lorna Tiller

Editor-in-Chief, MADE IN BED