by David Kolb, Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Bates College

This essay is presented as part of AG3: The Third International Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy Conference sponsored at Griffith University in Brisbane. It will be published in the journal Inflexions.

Abstract:

When an architectural intervention is attempting to re-form people's way of living in space, people must experience the new kind of architecture surrounding them. But how? Distanced "aesthetic experience" of architecture is seldom appropriate, and especially not for the work of Arakawa and Gins. Many artists have tried to escape the Museum with its aesthetic reverence for canonized works presented in a traditional space. This hypertext essay investigates the not fully solved problem of presenting and publicizing Arakawa and Gins' new architecture without making it either the object of a tourist's visit or the target of a museum goer's contemplative gaze.