The HBR List 2009 - Stumbling to a Longer Life

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Stumbling to a Longer Life

Next time your company reconfigures an interior space or builds itself a new headquarters, consider how the design you select might help employees live longer.

The architects Arakawa (who goes by his last name only) and Madeline Gins, his wife and longtime collaborator, have declared their “intention not to die.” To that end (or not, as the case may be), they’ve created architectural features that promote “death resistance” by requiring people to navigate unsettling, disorienting, and dangerous but whimsical spaces.

Their eccentrically designed Bioscleave House, in East Hampton, New York – the subject of a sometimes incredulous April 2008 New York Times article by the architecture writer Fred A. Bernstein – features interior elements of topography, texture, color, and light that, taken together, are meant to extend the residents’ life spans. As Bernstein wrote in the Times, “Its architecture makes people use their bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium, and that, [Gins] said, will stimulate their immune systems.”

On their website (www.reversibledestiny.org) the pair say they have spent the better part of four decades “studying how architecture might best be used to sustain life.” In the conventional sense, of course, architecture is the design of shelter, and shelter protects us from inhospitable elements. But Arakawa and Gins mean to accomplish something else: to design shelters whose discombobulating layouts, uneven surfaces, and jarring colors safeguard motor, visual, and cognitive skills from the degenerative effects of too much ease and creature comfort.

They have created residential lofts in Mitaka, Japan, that, in the dreamy language of their website, require occupants to “examine ...

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