INITIATING CHANGE

摘要

The written, built and unbuilt works of Arakawa and Gins represent the outside of architecture. As artists-turned-architects, they are primarily concerned with enacting body-environments rather than producing environments for bodies to inhabit. This means that they do not consider architecture as a standalone entity, but as something inseparable from our bodies, and how and what we can become. More concisely, their concern is architecting rather than architecture.1 To some extent, they founded the New York-based Architectural Body Research Foundation (1987) to foreground architecting as a way to ask questions, where those questions are posed in order to initiate change. While Marcel Duchamp put painting back in service of the mind, Arakawa and Gins put architecture in service of (changing) the body, which rings a dissonant, dissident chord in a profession where innovation often conserves value.