Archrypt The Time-capsule as a Design-driven Method

Welcome to the End Times

The pressing warnings from the scientific community about the depletion of available resources and the irreversible effects of climate change, the perpetuation of recurring economic crises, the exacerbation of social inequalities, and the escalation of new nationalisms and conflicts suggest the perception of the imminent advent of one or more disasters of global proportions 1.

While on the one hand, there is a debate on what strategies could avert or postpone the catastrophe occurrence, on the other hand, emerges the question of preserving the traces of a threatened world and transmitting posterity the signs of our existence as instruments for the archaeologists of the future.

Is it possible to organize a repertoire of knowledge, theories, and projects so that this heritage constitutes not only a cultural archive but also a potential operational kit capable of offering our disciplinary relevance even in a remote and uncertain future?

The idea of transporting the traces of one's existence to the future is structured with modernity. The proper notion of a time capsule as “a container used to store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of life at a particular time” is exemplified by the Crypt of Civilization, created by Thornwell Jacobs in 1937 [ 1 ]. The research investigates this conceptual device in architectural terms, considering architecture as a time capsule ante litteram and exploring its potentiality as a design-driven methodology.

Learning from the End Times: the archiving process

The selection process focuses on the relation between architecture and disaster, letting a heritage of design strategies emerge. As recalled in a recent book, crises accelerate situations that are often already elaborated within the disciplinary debate 3. Therefore, architecture seems to have an intrinsic capacity to evoke the disaster to which it is then called to respond. Rather than claiming a resolving role for humanity’s problems, this feature emphasizes the architecture's ability to underline the contradictions of the socio-economic contexts in which it elaborates its production and mandate.

The project recognizes 1945 (the year of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as the catastrophic event par excellence: the time difference between that year and our contemporaneity is projected backward to establish the time frame boundaries to select the archive content.

Consequently, the analysis of the most significant disasters with global relevance, according to the size of the destructive event, its duration, and the number of victims, let the disaster categories emerge: environmental/health disasters; economic/financial/energy crises; wars/conflicts/terroristic attacks; epidemics/pandemics; cyclones/floods/typhoons/hurricanes; earthquakes and tsunamis.

The selected projects may directly relate to a specific disastrous event 4 5; others express the change of architectural, cultural paradigm stimulated by a specific Zeitgeist or by an epochal critical turning point (for example, the recycling processes in the shadow of the environmental or economic crisis 6, or narrative forms that critically take the current condition to extremes adopting dystopian or utopian narratives 7. [ 2 ]

Hence, the archive organization resulted in a diagram, which consistently follows a horizontal scan from the smallest scale to gradually increase to the size of the landscape, reaching that of the entire planet. [ 3 –6 ]

The densification of catastrophic events over time corresponds to an increase in the projects' time horizon (as can be seen from the vertical lines) and their transcalar value (highlighted by horizontal lines) at these intersections between time and scale factors, time capsule devices are frequently noted. [ 7 ]

Additionally, the archiving process provokes the emergence of transversal connections between projects that materialize a corpus of design strategies, beyond time and space scale factors: from adaption to containment, bury, inflate, camouflage, but also recovery, reuse, and so on... [ 8 ]

The process raises a productive flow in which the archive feeds on additional ancillary considerations that define the internal logic of this cataloguing. Finally, the archive unfolds geography of narratives, practices, and discourses intertwining apocalypse and architecture: drawings, diagrams, models, visions, texts, samples of anthropic and natural materials alternates and are collected according to the time and space scale factor.

The archive for the post-apocalyptic future: first design experimentation

Exploring the time capsule as a design-driven method assembled two consequent artefacts, characterized by extremely different expiring-date horizons (geologically long vs. ephemerally short). The first is Archrypt, an archive where the relation between the selected content and the designed container elaborates a significant space for the post-apocalyptic future.

Tracing the genealogy of architectural time capsules 8, four main categories are identified: the burial, the archive, the bunker, and the spaceship [ 9 ]. The archive form derives from the assemblage of these archetypes, the ziggurat, and the stepped skyscraper, reversing its direction and density, obtaining a cavity to organize the archive content. Moreover, through a ready-made operation, a pyramid (exterior landmark) and a space shuttle (symbolic underground entrance) are superimposed at the extremes of this volume. The archive vertical scan follows the projects' size. The lower level hosts 1:1 scale artefacts 9; going to the upper levels, the projects' scale increases, and therefore, the dimensions of the maquette decrease exhibiting urban and territorial models and visions 10 [ 10 ]. In contrast, the vertical connections cross the different scales identifying the thematic paths related to the six disaster categories, ending at the upper level with the message intended for the man of the future and the dimensional references to decode all the archive projects 11.

Archrypt aims to be a critical-operational work on transmitting architectural memory through an architecture of memory. Archrypt refers to the ancestral dimension of architecture connected to its function of time capsule ante litteram.

The performative archive for the post-apocalyptic now: second design experimentation

Facing the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis, the multimedia installation and performance Apocalipsis cum figuris 12 confronted a real catastrophe as a condition where the architecture itself became the material object and immaterial medium of experimentation: the imposed social distancing implied the reformulation of the archive methods of use. Consequently, the building has been temporarily converted into a time capsule by following four main design principles: inaccessibility, extension of architectural elements through different media, simultaneity of representation, and dynamic interaction among environmental conditions.

Thus, the archive is designed as a performative and narrative apparatus, where the multimedia/dynamic stream of interactive information produced an inversion: architecture does not contain but speaks for itself. [ 11–13 ]

An open-epilogue: unfolding the time-capsule reformulation

By adopting the time-capsule as design-driven method, the research project investigates the archive device both on a theoretical level, collecting and selecting contents, and on a design level, by defining the physical container as the outcome of the archiving process.

The elaboration and the outcomes determine two parallel and inverse processes: on the one hand, the design of an archive by an organized community, informed and aware of its condition and destiny; on the other hand, the impossibility of foreseeing what will be the cultural and cognitive requirements of the possible capsule discoverers and what processes that such a collection of projects could trigger in them. This indeterminateness reserves a projective potential, a territory in which the real and the imaginary are explored using an extreme narrative register, which abandons any claim to objectivity to prove its possible limits and translate them into a material configuration.