MixedMedia

Now and then you come across a preposterous-sounding claim. Back in the day it used to be something like, “Git yer bunny gizzrd poshuns an’ lilly oyle lintmints! Garunteed tuh cure all aches an unwanted blemishes t’the skin!”

Today, apparently, is sounds something like, “We know what to do. We know how to extend life. And we feel that architecture can yield answers.” “Defy death,” quips one observer. “Cradle tentativeness,” says one creator.

What is this? A house with no flatness. The irony? You have to sign a release before going in… Here’s a snip from the New York Times, where I saw the article:

THE house is off-limits to children, and adults are asked to sign a waiver when they enter. The main concern is the concrete floor, which rises and falls like the surface of a vast, bumpy chocolate chip cookie.

But, for Arakawa, 71, an artist who designed the house with his wife, Madeline Gins, the floor is a delight, as well as a proving ground.

As he scampered across it with youthful enthusiasm on a Friday evening in March, he compared himself to the first man to walk on the moon. “If Neil Armstrong were here, he would say, ‘This is even better!’ ”

Then Ms. Gins, 66, began holding forth about the health benefits of the house, officially called Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa). Its architecture makes people use their bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium, and that, she said, will stimulate their immune systems.

“They ought to build hospitals like this,” she said.

A reporter, who thinks they should never, ever build hospitals like this, tried to go with the flow. Like the undulating floor, Arakawa and Gins, as they are known professionally, tend to throw people off balance.

In 45 years of working together as artists, poets and architects, they have developed an arcane philosophy of life and art, a theory they call reversible destiny. Essentially, they have made it their mission — in treatises, paintings, books and now built projects like this one — to outlaw aging and its consequences.

“It’s immoral that people have to die,” Ms. Gins explained.

The house on Long Island, which cost more than $2 million to build, is their first completed architectural work in the United States — and, as they see it, a turning point in their campaign to defeat mortality.

The house, which is still unoccupied, was commissioned in the late 1990s by a friend who sold the property to an anonymous group of investors after the project dragged on and costs mounted. But it is ready, Arakawa and Ms. Gins said, to begin rejuvenating whoever moves in.

Sheesh. Well, read more!