Archrypt The Time-capsule as a Design-driven Method

Introduction

The catastrophe is a condition with which part of humanity must interface daily: environmental disasters, pandemics, economic/energy crises, cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, conflict, and terrorism. Whether it is to represent extreme apocalyptic conditions or to produce specific emergency solutions, the architectural discipline has produced ad hoc scenarios or projects, thus determining a heritage of design strategies 1 (fig.1).

How to organize a repertoire of knowledge, strategies and tactics, theories, and projects that could constitute a potential operational archive capable of offering our disciplinary relevance even in a remote and uncertain future?

The archive organization

For the construction of our archive, we have selected a significant time frame. Since the dawn of time, humanity has had to live with catastrophic events of natural origin. The advent of modernity has triggered additional risk factors due to the heterogeneity of industrial activities. The condition of globalization has further urged the spread of critical conditions (attacks by international terrorism, pandemics, etc.) with which contemporary society is forced to live. Therefore, the time interval chosen for the construction of our archive chooses 1945 (the year of the bombs on Hiroshima in Nagasaki) as the watershed within which to build the selection of theories and projects that in some way responded to emergency conditions related to the crises and disasters, have been affected by the effects of those events by means of the definition of new design paradigms or even, sometimes, foreseen, through the extremization of conditions given through dystopian narratives, the advent of one or more critical events 2. In this sense, as Mirko Zardini recalled in a recent paper, crises work as accelerators of situations that are often already elaborated within the disciplinary debate 3. Therefore, there seems to be an intrinsic capacity of architecture to evoke the disaster to which it is then called to respond. Rather than claiming a resolving role for humanity’s problems, this main disciplinary feature emphasizes the ability of architecture to bring out the contradictions both of the socio-economic contexts in which it elaborates its production and its mandate. The construction of the archive expresses this awareness, collecting a repertoire of theories and projects that have been developed in conjunction with some specific, real or hypothetical emergencies 4. (fig.2)

The categories of disasters (fig.3) consider events that have had, or continue to have, a significant impact, sometimes even globally, distinguished by natural origin or induced by anthropogenic activities. In some cases, the relationship between catastrophic events and projects is direct (as in the case of Shigeru Ban, Housing Nepal Project, 2015). In others, it is evoked by a specific or generic crisis hypothesis or by a dystopian narrative that places the project as a revealing device of one or more possible threats (as in the case of Design Earth, Geostories, 2018). This concerns various phenomena: from traumatized landscapes (Vajont dam) to contaminated sites (Chernobyl), to paradoxical and conflictual urban contexts (American Sprawl during the recent financial crisis of 2008), to cross the extreme settlement scenarios of the desert (Nevada Test Site), water (Katrina), hypothetical glaciation or even beyond the limits of planet earth.

Our selection of theories and projects falls within a possible categorization of the architecture of the end of time. Starting from this selection, we traced a series of projects and theories that somehow related to these disasters, organizing them according to the scale factor, from the XS dimension (the individual object) to the XL dimension (from the territory to the entire planet).

The organization of our archive consistently follows a horizontal scan from the smallest scale (the individual device and/or the object) to gradually increase the dimension of the landscape.

What emerges from this study is that there are overlaps between time and scale factors, i.e. the overlapping and densification of catastrophic events over time corresponds to an increase in the time horizon of the projects (as can be seen from the vertical lines) and their transcalar value (highlighted by horizontal lines). At these intersections, time capsule devices (Mundaneum, Seed Bank, Living Capsule-Time) are frequently noted. (fig.4-7)

The archive: the container

The same principles of construction of the archive contents determine the spatial and dimensional organization of the container: the vertical scan is organized by the size of the projects. In contrast, the vertical connections connect the different scales identifying the thematic paths relating to the six catastrophic themes.

Considering the archetypes that emerged in the genealogical study of the time capsules shape 5, there are four types identified for the construction of Archrypt: the pyramid, the ziggurat, the underground skyscraper, and the space shuttle, which we have reworked in a ready-made operation. (fig.8)

Our design approach reworks these archetypal forms, the ziggurat as well as the stepped skyscraper, reversing its direction and density, obtaining a cavity in which to organize the archive, in an articulated scanning of architectural content. Moreover, at the top and bottom of this void, a pyramid and a space shuttle are superimposed in a ready-made operation. The pyramid’s choice derives from the need to have a landmark recognizable and accessible exclusively through underground routes. Finally, the space shuttle becomes the symbolic device for accessing the system. (fig.9)

The hypogean skyscraper principle responds well to the distribution needs of the archive, where we find, starting from the lower level, 1: 1 scale artifacts such as Mind Expander (Haus Rucker-co) or Refuge Wear or even ParaSITE by Rackovitz. On the upper level, the container incorporates the contained objects that are housing units such as Fuller’s Dymaxion house or Shigeru Ban’s Paper Log Houses. Going up, the project scale increases, and therefore the maquette one decreases, in this case, scale reproductions of projects such as Torre David or the Baloon House, to name a few.

The urban scale is the protagonist of the fourth level, which houses models of imagined and unimagined cities, such as Isozaki’s Mirage City or Tigerman’s Urban Matrix.

At the penultimate level, the galleries of projects on a territorial scale become audiences with bas-reliefs of projects such as Superstudio’s Continuous Monument or OMA’s Resist Delay Store Discharge.

Each catastrophic path ends at the top level, with a comparative model of the effects generated on the ground by the related category of disaster. At this level we can find the dimensional references to decode all the archive projects (from the metric and foot system to LC’s Modulor, architectural histograms, and Neufert’s Man measures and spatial requirements).

The message for the man of the future

“We know now that the idea of the future as a ‘better world’ was a fallacy of the doctrine of progress. The hopes we center on you, citizens of the future, are in no way exaggerated. [...] Brothers of the future, united with us in the spirit and in this endeavor, we send our greetings.” T. Mann, 1938

Research results

By adopting the time-capsule method as our design-driven method, our project investigates the archive device both on a theoretical level, through 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 outcome of Archrypt determines two parallel and inverse processes: on the one hand, the design and organization 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 Archrypt discoverers and what the processes that such a collection and organization of projects could trigger in them. This tension between a certain degree of determination — the project itself — and its not precisely determinable reception — the conceivable outcome — is the potential that places the designer as the animator of individual desires.

The same 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 an objective configuration.