Madeline Arakawa

Madeline Helen Gins (her surname is pronounced with a hard “g”) was born in New York City on Nov. 7, 1941, and reared in Island Park, N.Y. In 1962 she earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, where she studied physics and Eastern philosophy. She later studied painting and began her working life as a poet.

With her husband, with whom she collaborated for nearly half a century, Ms. Gins practiced an idiosyncratic and highly personal brand of art that sought to deploy architecture in the service of large essential questions about the nature of being.

The couple’s vision, as articulated in their published writings and their buildings, was beyond Utopian. It sought not merely better living — but, ideally, eternal living — through design.

Article