Arakawa + Gins, "Bioscleve House (Life Extending Villa)"
In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard points out that they are as willing to die as we are to live. They are terrorists. We are the consumer capitalist global order.
Baudrillard sees a disturbing manifestation of a trend of consumer culture he first observed in Symbolic Exchange and Death more than thirty years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: that slavery functions by way of a prohibition against death, and of all the social taboos produced by ‘global’ culture in the later half of the 20th century, such a prohibition – a prohibition on death, against a person’s moral right to die – is the most widespread.
It is the slave owner, the master, who can die. The slave cannot die. Captured in war, the slave’s life is transferred to an infinite debt. He lives on credit; his death becomes the most immoral act possible, because it constitutes a failure to amend the debt accrued when his life was spared by his master.
When we see suicidal terrorism on TV, our reaction to it is one of moral indignation. Of course, there is the outward violence of the event, the civilian casualties, the destruction, the reality of it all; but, we also react to the terrorist’s suicide – to the act – which we view as dispicable and perverse. The terrorist has broken the rules. The individual life is the one thing that no one has the right to gamble, and what’s more, they use their suicide as a means to achieve martyrdom and enter paradise.
Baudrillard says that weaponizing death, parleying death as means to eternal reward, is precisely the act in which, for us, the West has no confidence.
What is there to die for? What cause is worthy enough to attract a revolutionary martyr? In what circumstance would my death evoke divine sympathy and reserve for me a place in Heaven?
We almost uniformly answer that there is no such cause. Instead, we emphasize our obligation to youth, health, and longevity on Earth. We strive to fulfill our debt to the consumer capitalist system as maximally as we can.
Choose wisely.
Is this not the Holy Grail of consumer capitalism: the eternal consumer, the consumer who does not die, but consumes infinitely, forever and ever?
It is.
If we track the prohibition against death architecturally, we find an easy beginning in Modernism: the home is a machine for living. Modern architecture addresses life as a problem that can be solved by providing fundamental structures necessary to support the productive function of the human being. The subject of Modern architecture is the industrial worker, who is as uniform and interchangeable as parts on an assembly line. He is a construction, architectural himself, a product of an economic system. The system, in turn, supports its product by anticipating general needs infrastructurally.
The Apartments at Weissenhof, Modernist Living
The West’s metamorphosis from an industrial society to a consumer society changed the paradigm. In Modernism, the death of the industrial worker is an unfortunate certainty. Workers die, but it’s no big deal, since the infrastructure addresses the subject as an interchangeable part with a projectable life expectancy. So long as the nation supports a steady birth rate, it can replace the workers who die within the system with new workers that are identical in terms of productivity. The consumer economy, by contrast, identifies each generation as a specific demographic whose existence supports an economic niche; when a generation expires, the economy contracts. Its products can be resuscitated and redistributed in the market, but only by way of advertizing, which is a form of waste, ancillary to the product itself.
The obvious answer to the problem of death is to abolish it, and until recently Post-Modern architecture has been slow to answer the call. Hiding behind their computers and hordes of cannon-fodder grad student interns, they sought to mystify us with kitschy bullshit and fractals, dazzle us with biomorphic, blobist hyperstructures, and stupefy us with buildings so astonishingly ugly that we can’t help but scratch our heads and say, “Well, I guess it’s art.”
Bioscleve House, interior view (with extra light)
Architects Arakawa + Gins have mastered all these techniques (not so much the first two, but definitely the last), but what is special about them is their philosophical insistence on death as a reversible destiny. Arakawa + Gins say they “have decided not to die,” and have written books called Making Dying Illegal and Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die, and unsurprisingly their architecture revolves around this proposition like a superposition; it informs all of their new and proposed structures. This all reeks of scam; but, somehow, they have managed to build something: Bioscleve House (Life Extending Villa) in East Hampton, New York, for a measly couple million bucks (give or take a million); until Bioscleve, the pair had not built in the US.
"This will really work your abs."
The idea of Bioscleve concerns the means by which a structure confronts the body: if a building tortures the body enough, by Arakawa and Gins’ logic, the body will thrive healthfully forever. Baudrillard once said that one can draw a direct line from the torture racks of the inquisition to exercise machines; so too can one connect the bed-of-nails and iron maidens of medieval times to Bioscleve House. Everything in the house is intended to make the dweller uncomfortable by way of continuous, environmental exercise. The concrete floor is cratered like the moon, to keep the dweller continuously off balance. Stripper poles vault penis-like out of the floor to provide support as one navigates the house. Countertops are jagged and asymmetrical. The house’s color palate is out of control: a syncopated miasma of thoroughly atrocious, loud, clashing colors meant to continuously shock the eye and distort spatial perception – really, the choice of color in Bioscleve House is absolutely terrible, about as harmonious as a brass band thrown down the stairs, or, in this case, just into the living room; it is the color that most reveals the house for the cheap, hick-town, snake-oil science museum it is.
Bioscleve House, exterior
Architecturally, it’s easy to write off Bioscleve House as a failure. The house is an ugly and unsophisticated one-trick pony. From the outside, it looks like a circa 1975 low income bungalow that was renovated haphazardly by the 10 pot-smoking college dropouts renting the house. The inside is more likely to kill you than help you live forever, either by way of a blow to the head from one of the dagger-like countertops after tripping on the cookie-dough floor or via overexposure to pure hideousness; yet, it is precisely this irony, and the philosophical statement the house attempts to realize – life everlasting (starting with the rich) – that is more difficult to dismiss out of hand.
Bioscleve, digital blueprint
In Bioscleve House, we are the science experiment; like a marketing team, Bioscleve tests us continuously – can we live forever? Is this method for extending life a productive one? Does this really work? What are we buying? Arakawa + Gins have big plans for “reversible destiny” architecture: whole cites constructed under the Bioscleve model, total environments dedicated to subjecting all inhabitants to this sort of sado-masochistic self-improvement, worlds of discomfort, utopias of eternal boredom ornamented with bumpy floors and rock hard abs. I ask: to what end this torture? Why keep us alive?
In America, Baudrillard says that since we no longer expect global destruction to come from another superpower, like the USSR before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we now expect destruction to come from within. We cannot restrain our growth, and we expect the system, eventually, to collapse from the strain. We avert destruction by expelling all our energy in meaningless pursuits, exercise, and so on, in short, boring ourselves to death. Here, Baudrillard is prophetic again in that destruction from within constitutes a hallmark of terrorist strategy: anyone can be a terrorist and we are all potential terrorists, ready to detonate at any moment at any point within the system like land-mines sleeping in the suburbs. There is also nothing more monotonous than terrorism: every day in Baghdad someone blows himself up, it resonates through the media networks like a dull echo in a warehouse, but ultimately amounts only to a reverberation of nothing. Nothing is ever achieved by this violence. The West is not vanquished; exploitation is not halted. There is no “clash of civilizations.” The violence done by the terrorist is not the same as violence done between warring parties in the past in that there are no real oppositions in the ‘global’ economy, only one more or less homogenized cosmopolitan identity beneath the sign of consumer capitalism. Terrorist violence is the violence of the interpellated against the interpellated, of the system itself against the system itself. People express their outrage at the overt war-profiteering Halliburton and so many other American corporations engage in, but nobody is shocked by it; at the end of the day, we expect a portion of the capitalist system to inhabit just such a niche. If they blow themselves up, we respond by condemning the immorality of it all, but it is precisely such an act that we ourselves are unable to muster the energy for; if we build houses, as Arakawa + Gins demonstrate, we might condemn death itself for its immoral behavior just as easily, but it is precisely the agency of death, its ability to produce an absolutely unique and irreversible event – the singularity of our death – that we despair of ever being able to produce in life.
Gins, in an interview for the New York Times, says, “After this, Gehry, Rem Koolhass — boring.” Big words. She fails to recognize what kind of life she condemns the future residents of Bioscleve House to. We all know that no place is more boring than Heaven on a Saturday night. Why? Because nothing ever happens and you’re stuck there forever.
I like this, Ryland.
Not to discount the other points, but there is something to Bioscleve’s design that does support a certain kind of longevity. Learning to move our bodies in novel ways has been shown to be have neuro-protectant properties (meaning that the brain dies more slowly). I suppose, also, were we to move into that house in our 50s we might also enhance our balance and so promote our physical body.
But you’re right: we might also impale ourselves. Or choke to death on a chicken nugget (cf. Flava’s post this week).