Shusaku Arakawa obituary

Japanese architect and artist whose challenging designs tilted at mortality
Shusaku Arakawa
The apartments that Arakawa, below, called reversible destiny lofts, in Mitaka, Tokyo Photograph: Franck Robichon/EPA

The Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa believed that it was immoral for people to have to die. With his wife, Madeline Gins, he designed houses and public spaces that were supposed to help stop us from ageing. His death, at the age of 73, is a flaw in his philosophy of transhumanism, or reversible destiny. "This mortality thing is bad news," Gins said after he died, adding that she would now increase her efforts to prove that "ageing can be outlawed".

Shusaku Arakawa 2
Shusaku Arakawa

For Arakawa and Gins, the ideal form of a house was one that kept residents in a "perpetually tentative relationship with their surroundings". The more our homes challenge us, architecturally, the more likely we are to stay young, grappling with their complexities and, in the case of Arakawa and Gins's flats and houses, their sheer oddity – even perversity.

Their most extreme design, the Bioscleave house (2008), in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, took eight years to build and cost the couple $2m of their own money. Before this colourful and bewildering home was finished, Arakawa and Gins lost the small fortune that they had accumulated since the early 1960s. They had invested money through Bernard Madoff, the American conman they had met at an art exhibition in New York, and the resulting loss led them to close their office in Manhattan.

The Bioscleave house boasted at least three dozen shades of paint. The building features sloping floors in the guise of cartoon-like sand dunes, windows placed where no window is normally placed, level changes aimed at conveying a feeling of being in two places at once, no doors, no privacy, curiously shaped rooms and any number of other surrealist tricks.

The house was designed to keep residents and visitors on their toes – they are hard pushed to even remain vertical. A number of floor-to-ceiling poles were provided, which can be grasped if the inevitable sense of disorientation gets a bit too much.

These curious devices were intended to stimulate us in ways conventional homes do not. A state of comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, creates anxiety because, although cosseting, it can only ever be finite – and thus shortens rather than prolongs life.

Arakawa rarely used his first name. He was born in Nagoya, studied maths and medicine at the University of Tokyo and attended Musashino art school in Tokyo, where he made surrealist prints. He set off for New York in 1961 with, he claimed, just $14 and the artist Marcel Duchamp's phone number in his pockets. He took a course at Brooklyn Museum art school where, in 1962, he met and married Gins, a fellow student. In 1987 they started the Containers of Mind Foundation together, which later evolved into the Architectural Body Research Foundation. These were the hard-to-place philosophical stepping-stones of their lifelong attempt to create buildings that would enable us to defy death.

They began to paint a series of 83 large paintings on the theme of the mechanism of meaning which were exhibited around the world and, over the years, paid for Arakawa and Gins' architectural experiments. To date, these are a project for a city of reversible destiny on 75 acres of Tokyo wasteland (it never happened); the Bioscleave house; and nine reversible destiny lofts in Mitaka, Tokyo, completed in 2005 at a total cost of around $6m.

The reversible destiny lofts boast colourful rooms in the form of cylinders, cubes and spheres and are known for being interesting and challenging, rather than comfortable, to live in. They are dedicated to the memory of Helen Keller, the American author and political activist who lost her sight and hearing as a child. Keller was a role model for Arakawa and Gins because by relearning how to communicate, she somehow proved that reversible destiny was possible.

The pair believed that the ideal residents of their homes should, following the same principle, be blank slates so that their experience of architecture was continually novel. In this way, explained Arakawa, they would forget that they had to die.

Arakawa had exhibitions of his work around the world, including at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote poetry, animated by such thought-provoking sentiments as "when I am away from you, I feel like a watermelon seed", and "he is elegant between his toes".

He published several tantalising books with Gins, notably The Mechanism of Meaning (1971), Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die (1997) and Making Dying Illegal (2006).

Gins survives him.
