The present Doodle praises the 85th birthday celebration of Japanese-American author, conceptual artist, and trans-humanist architect Shusaku Arakawa.
Along with his wife, Arakawa pursued a philosophical quest for interminability through exploratory paintings, literature, and, at the grandest scale, architectural oddities—an idea coined Reversible Destiny.
Shusaku Arakawa was born on this day in 1936 in Nagoya, Japan. His initial life was characterized by mathematics and medicine studies before he sought after surrealist painting at Tokyo’s Musashino Art University.
As an early adopter of the international conceptual art movement, he joined also disapproved of artists after his 1961 move to New York City. Before long, Shusako met an artist who turned into his lifelong artistic collaborator and spouse: Madeline Gins.
In 1963, the couple started the yearning “The Mechanism of Meaning” series—a collection of 83 enormous panel paintings with the aim of investigating the mysteries of human consciousness that needed longer than 10 years to bring to fruition. Worldwide shows of the masterwork opus financed the couple’s next lofty endeavor: expanding future by cultivating a novel relationship with the assembled world called “procedural architecture.”
They hypothesized that drawing in occupants with testing inside plans, for example, steep and lopsided floor plans, would boost immunity and fight aging by promoting a active and thoughtful relationship with one’s environmental factors. Their first private works of procedural design can be found at Reversible Destiny Lofts, a complex in Tokyo and the motivation for the present Doodle artwork.
Arakawa and Gins devoted their lives to designing an architectural fountain of youth and founded multiple institutions to propel this venture, including the Reversible Destiny Foundation. Today, a few installations of their eccentric architecture stay open to the general population, for example, the Reversible Destiny Lofts.
This renown project involves a brilliantly colored residential complex in Tokyo that filled in as the couple’s first work of procedural architecture, which they devoted to Helen Keller.
Happy birthday, Shusaku Arakawa!
