The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema. See all published pamphlets HERE.
Volume 8 is dedicated to The Reversible Destiny Foundation created by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. The Foundation is much more than an architectural practice. It articulates art, philosophy, poetry, architecture and, to some extent, science in a dialogue that benefits each of these disciplines and ultimately serves one of the most radical ideas that apply to architecture: the action of non-dying. Guest authors include Shingo Tsuji, Stanley Shostak, Russell Hughes, and Jean-François Lyotard.
Vol. 8_Arakawa + Madeline Gins includes: Introduction: Towards an Architecture of Joy — Architectures of Joy: A Spinozist Reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’s Architecture — Applied Spinozism: Architectures of the Sky vs. Architectures of the Earth — Architecture of the Conatus: “Tentative Constructing Towards a Holding in Place” — Architectures of Joy: A Conversation Between Two Puzzle Creatures [Part A] — Architectures of Joy: A Conversation Between Two Puzzle Creatures [Part B] — Domesticity in the Reversible Destiny’s Architectural Terrains — Reversible Destiny Loft in Action: A Tentative Report from a Resident (by Shingo Tsuji) — A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normalized Body — The Counter-Biopolitical Bioscleave Experiment Imagined (by Stanley Shostak) — Funambulist Paper #35 / DIY Biopolitics: The Deregulated Self (by Russell Hughes) — Letter from Jean-François Lyotard to Arakawa and Madeline Gins — Architectures for Non-Dying Creatures: The Artistic-Philosophical-Poetic-Architectural Work of Arakawa and Gins — “All Men Are Sisters”: A Joy Named Madeline Gins
The Funambulist Pamphlets is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.
About the Editor
Léopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect who has lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai and currently resides in New York. His approach to architecture consists in a delicate articulation between theoretical research and a frank enthusiasm for design. Such an articulation has been explicated in his book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), which attempts to examine the characteristics that make architecture an inherent political weapon through global research as well as an architectural project specific to the Israeli civil and military occupation of the West Bank. He is also the author of the graphic novel, Lost in the Line. He finds his architectural inspiration from films, novels, and political philosophy books, rather than in architectural theory texts. He is currently collaborating with Madeline Gins for her Reversible Destiny Foundation (created with the late Arakawa) whose philosophical and architectural work is highly influential upon the role of architecture in relation to the human body.
The Funambulist: Architectural Narratives , a daily architectural platform written and edited by Léopold Lambert, finds its name in the consideration for architecture’s representative medium, the line, and its philosophical and political power when it materializes and subjectivizes bodies. If the white page represents a given milieu — a desert for example — and one comes to trace a line on it, (s)he will virtually split this same milieu into two distinct impermeable parts through its embodiment, the wall. The Funambulist, also known as a tightrope walker, is the character who, somehow, subverts this power by walking on the line.