Ark Architecture Space Suspension Strategies

Architectures, cities and territories are today crossed by transformations out of control. The advancement of forests, the intrusion of animals, floods, earthquakes, fires, are changing the “territory of architecture” after years of apparent stability. At the same time, as argued by the Italian philosopher Federico Campagna, we are witnessing the collapse of an old world giving way to a new one for which we are unprepared, and for which we need new design tools 1. In the face of the loss of the notion and the condition of order, and in front of new unknown cultural and life questions, we see the need of strategies that acting in advance and working over a long period of time can save those materials that could be lost but at the same time could be useful to design new beginnings: we need a new Noah’s Ark. We find ourselves, to quote a drawing by Massimo Scolari, “Alla fine della storia”, inside an “apocalypse” where “all is lost” and the city is in fragment. The modernist certainty of a bright tomorrow gives way to unpredictable futures: it is therefore the time of a new refoundation cycle.

The immersion in what Timothy Morton calls “Dark Ecology”, questions architectures and tools able to anticipate the present, at the same time to review some positions of architecture from its foundations in front of contexts defined no longer by the static data but by the emergence of other entities which claim for space 2. We are therefore witnessing today the return of a figure, in reality ancient, called the ark, understood as architecture to accumulate necessary treasures and ferry them to other destinies by suspending their use. The ark in fact stands as a closed but ephemeral and defenseless architecture, able to retain precious materials, to block their aging until they are released when necessary 3. The construction of real arks such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway 4 calls into question this ancient figure, an archetype, necessary to carry us and our treasure toward a remote distant time. So, the Vitruvian notion of utilitas undergoes a twist in the sense of its possible suspension, this is the main question of the research: architecture, which has always been built for the immediate, is instead designed in advance, to be put “on hold” and then “used” in a distant future. Living today becomes therefore an expectation, literally a “tension towards”, a journey towards a destination, a look to what is yet to come, based on the future 5.

The ark’s strategy involves a temporal dynamic that consists of a triad composed of anticipating reality, suspending time and pervading the existing, with the final objective of re-foundation.

Anticipating reality speaks of the foundation of the ark starting from a prediction of a tomorrow that is expected to be unknown. In today’s world it is a question of anticipating reality, we need to ask ourselves about possible new practices of forecasting, between the realism of science and the oblique imagination of magic 6. At the same time, the question that Mike Davis asks about “Who will build the ark” 7 with what remains of our world today is at the center of the foundation of this figure: it is a question of choosing things not to be missed for the future, and then to deprive ourselves of them today. In Davis’ idea the ark is a collection of waste materials, of forgotten things, anonymous materials that we want to save; we are talking about architectures built starting from choices of what is necessary, that reveal their strength in the sense of restraint, of a wait that is a choice of time in which to act. Of course, it remains to be seen how this prediction will be realized, if it is reliable, if what is predicted will happen, but what is on question here is that the ark is planned with a possible future ahead of it, a destiny written before.

The second moment of the ark is the crossing of those contexts that are changing. The seal, the total absence of an exit defines the importance of what is housed inside but of course during the “flood” the shipwreck is always possible, architecture could also fail. What is housed in the arks must be “frozen” or cultivated: like an “enclaves in time” 8 the ark goes through the places while they change, remaining “suspended”, sealed but defenseless, retaining its contents: the ark is not only a conservative attempt but an extreme exploration of the future.

The third stage is finally marked by the opening of the architecture. The trauma is over, the ark is dismantled, and its content is freed to pervade and change the existing, “what has been lost”, or that has remained secret for years, can return to upset the already known coordinates. It is therefore a matter of suspending “the use of the bodies” 9 to “abandon spaces” to bring in the future those treasures, if not also life, that will serve to refound future new worlds. We will call them architectures of expectation.