The name Yoro (養老) itself means “nourishing the elderly” or “longevity,” and is tied to an 8th-century legend: a poor woodcutter discovered that the water of Yoro Falls had turned to sake, which rejuvenated his ageing father. When the story reached the imperial court, Emperor Genshō renamed the era Yoro (717–724) in honour of this miracle of filial piety and renewal. In this context, Arakawa and Gins’s project feels almost destined for the site, its philosophy of resisting ageing echoing the history and meaning embedded in the place.
The park is a deliberately disorienting landscape of tilted planes, sudden drops, coloured structures, and shifting terrains that unsettle balance and perception. Visitors encounter a series of experimental environments: the Reversible Destiny Office (1997), with its pastel maze and mirrored ceiling; the Critical Resemblance House, where walls bisect furniture beneath a roof shaped like a map of Gifu Prefecture; and the Elliptical Field, a concave basin filled with “Architectural Fragments” bearing evocative names such as Exactitude Ridge, Trajectory Membrane Gate, Zone of Clearest Confusion, Mono no Aware Transformer, and Imaging Navel. The site also includes five maps of Japan set at different scales, 148 intersecting paths, and 24 varieties of herbs planted to emphasise seasonal change.
For Arakawa and Gins, these shifting forms and environments were not whimsical, but strategic: they believed that by altering bodily perception, consciousness itself could be transformed. Yoro Park was thus designed as a site of continuous experimentation, where visitors—like children—are invited to climb, stumble, reorient, and improvise. In doing so, the park asks us to discover the body’s possibilities anew, and to imagine architecture as a tool not only for shelter but for reshaping life itself.
(Excerpt adapted from Reversible Destiny Foundation)