113 Springy Banks Road

Bioscleave House (Life-Span Extending Villa) is a unique design by famous, international, avant-garde artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa - proteges of the surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp - who have shown and published their work worldwide producing many radical books and iconoclastic exhibitions including The Guggenheim Museum.Here is a singular, rare masterwork - the only house they designed and built to test 50 years of research through this experimental, provocative laboratory. It is an "architectural body" studio-house - a stimulating environment for healthy living.There are two connected houses: The "back" Bioscleave House and the "front" original A-frame house. The new "back" house is an addition, a landscape of shifting forms punctuated by 52 colors. It is a 2,700-sq. ft. modernist, cubist design - is connected by a new link to the original and also architecturally significant 1960's "front" 900 sq. ft. house - designed by Harvard architect Carl Koch - inspired by the Bauhaus as a new kind of simple, economical, modern summer cottage. The "front" house has a living room with fireplace, two bedrooms, one and one-half baths, full basement, oil heating and air conditioning, and floor-to-ceiling sliding doors and windows. In total, the two houses and the "in-between" link form an architectural collage containing 3,400 sq. ft. with four bedrooms, two and a half baths, studio/study room (or fifth bedroom), a traditional living room with fireplace and a large, sunken "Italian" country kitchen, a raised dining and work platform - surrounded by 4 Arakawa/Gin's "landing sites" large, high and open cubic volumes. There are many "metaphysical" small slopes, hills, nooks and crannies made of Japanese rammed earth country floor to stimulate the feet, a kind of kaleidoscopic laboratory or incubator for living well and longer. The two houses, simple and complex and the link create an upbeat, energetic collective compound, a cultural and architectural collection. This is a rare work for living life as perpetual exercise in an environmental juxtaposition for puzzling about living life as art and art as living life, inside and out, and as Arakawa/Gins believed possibly forever.