Neo-Romance: Ark Archi­tec­ture of Expectation

“Who will build the ark?” is the ques­tion Mike Davis pos­es to the con­tem­po­rary world at a time when the only thing to do seems to be to save what is left of the old world and bring it into tomor­row.[2] All is lost. As we stand in the twi­light of the old world we are con­front­ed with frag­ments, places and the­o­ries in ruins; we inhab­it neo-roman­tic spaces, times and archi­tec­tures, defined by a nos­tal­gia for what we are los­ing and by hero­ic explo­rations towards the unknown. Archi­tec­ture, today, in the­o­ry and in prac­tice, deals with ​‘changes’ in a con­tin­u­ous cycle, a sal­va­tion­al attempt to bring life and our trea­sures towards the future. The con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous loss of con­di­tions of order calls for rea­son­ing regard­ing strate­gies that, by act­ing in advance and work­ing over extend­ed peri­ods of time, man­age to save those mate­ri­als that could be destroyed but at the same time could be use­ful for design­ing a new gen­e­sis, mov­ing through a time of wait­ing: all archi­tec­ture today is an ark in a ​‘flood’.[3] Assum­ing that exist­ing con­tex­tu­al sys­tems, intend­ed both from the phys­i­cal point of view of inhab­it­ed ter­ri­to­ries, urban and not, and from the ​'imma­te­r­i­al' point of view of cul­ture and knowl­edge, are shat­tered, the goal of the ark is ​‘rad­i­cal refoun­da­tion’, to ride-out a pos­si­ble and announced reset. In this essay, where the idea of the ark emerges as both a the­o­ret­i­cal and mate­r­i­al ​‘vehi­cle’, the first dis­cus­sion out­lines the return of ark from the illo tem­pore, its roots and its design strat­e­gy, and then con­sid­ers the frag­ments to be saved through a time of expec­ta­tion. The aim is to out­line a sort of rite of approach to the fig­ure of the ark, posi­tion­ing its fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics in rela­tion to the design and the­o­ries of architecture.

The Return of the Ark

‘Ark’ is derived from the Latin ​‘arca’ and from ​‘arceo’, mean­ing ​‘to hold with­in’, ​‘to keep divid­ed and shel­tered’, and con­tains the root ​‘arc’ which is Greek for ​‘arkein’, mean­ing ​‘to sup­port’ or ​‘repair’, and ​‘arkos’, mean­ing ​‘gar­ri­son’, ​‘defense’, ​‘strength’, and prob­a­bly relat­ed to the root ​‘raks’ from the San­skrit ​‘rak­samm’ ​‘to pre­serve’, ​‘to pro­tect’. In Latin it was a cof­fer or chest in which clothes, mon­ey and all man­ner of fur­nish­ings were stored; it was also a cell that served as a domes­tic prison for slaves. Today it is more com­mon­ly known as a chest for stor­ing valu­ables, grain or flour, and as a deposit for the dead in the form of an ark in a church or necrop­o­lis.[4] The ark is also the bot­tom of wells paved to hold water. 

The nar­ra­tive from which the ark emerges—the sto­ry of the flood—is pan-cul­tur­al (Euro­pean, Mid­dle East­ern, Egypt­ian, Asian, Ocean­ic, Amer­i­can), and its val­ue remains cross-cul­tur­al­ly impor­tant even giv­en the dif­fer­ences. There are two accounts to be con­sid­ered: the Baby­lon­ian Epic of Gil­gamesh and The Bible. Both texts belong to reli­gious and geo­graph­i­cal spheres that refer to spaces and archi­tec­tures of the begin­ning.[5] In fact, the ark appears in 4500 BC in the Epic of Gil­gamesh and only lat­er in sacred tales shared by oth­er cul­tures. The text con­tains the epi­cal sto­ry of the adven­tures of the king of Uruk— Gil­gamesh. The sto­ry is not a foun­da­tion myth like the bib­li­cal Gen­e­sis but a jour­ney of for­ma­tion. The recount­ing of the flood is told by Utnapish­tim to Gil­gamesh, and is only one episode with­in the Epic, intend­ed not so much to advance the gen­er­al nar­ra­tive as to con­vince Gil­gamesh of the futil­i­ty of his quest for eter­nal life. The sto­ry begins with a coun­cil of the gods who decide to exter­mi­nate human­i­ty. The objec­tive, unlike in Gen­e­sis, is not the plan­ning of a sec­ond cycle of human­i­ty but its total anni­hi­la­tion: the under­ly­ing motive is the ​“noise” pro­duced by men, a con­fu­sion not appre­ci­at­ed by the gods who decide to ​“impose on the sin­ner his sin”. In the field, there­fore, there are destruc­tive divini­ties, Enlil and Ištar; a trai­tor­ous divin­i­ty, Enki, who secret­ly announces the flood to Utnapish­tim, order­ing him to destroy his own house in order to build an ark with dis­card­ed mate­ri­als, telling him how to build it and what to put inside it in order to save him­self. The over­all struc­ture is sim­i­lar to the bib­li­cal sto­ry and is com­posed of ​“The flood sto­ry begins”; ​“Enki’s help”; ​“the con­struc­tion of the ark”; ​“The flood destroys all life”; ​“the explorato­ry mis­sion of the birds”; ​“sac­ri­fices of the sur­vivor”. The dif­fer­ence between the two nar­ra­tives lies in the con­clu­sions: in the Bible there is a covenant between man and the deity, but in the Epic the nar­ra­tive ends with the absence of a covenant, with the gods ​“gath­ered like flies around the offer­or”.[6]

In his essay Noah’s Ark, Hubert Damisch returns the fig­ure of the ark to the dis­ci­pline of archi­tec­ture while inves­ti­gat­ing the impli­ca­tions of this return for design the­o­ry. Damisch con­sid­ers ​‘ark’ via the def­i­n­i­tion by abbè Edme-François Mal­let with­in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Ency­clopédie, con­sid­er­ing it a space that pre­cedes archi­tec­ture: ​“The alpha­bet­i­cal order of the Ency­clopédie that called for the entry ​‘Ark’ to come just a bit before the entry ​‘Archi­tec­ture’ was, in the end, nei­ther for­tu­itous nor arbi­trary. Archi­tec­ture could only find its place after the Flood – or rather, in its stead’.[7] Hav­ing to deal with a world in frag­ments, archi­tec­ture thus becomes a ​“promise” in a salvif­ic-escha­to­log­i­cal sense.[8] Slo­ter­dijk says: ​“The mor­pho-evan­gel­i­cal sense of the bib­li­cal and extra-bib­li­cal accounts of the uni­ver­sal flood, and of the fan­tasies of the ark that are linked to them, is that the form that allows men to be togeth­er ​“inside” them­selves does not bring immu­ni­ty and sal­va­tion only in a vague metaphor­i­cal sense, but can also be the con­di­tion of sal­va­tion and sur­vival from a tech­ni­cal point of view […] With this a new project is brought into the world: the idea of self-pro­tec­tion and self-cir­cum­ven­tion [Selb­s­tumge­bung] of a group with respect to an exter­nal world that has become impos­si­ble.””.^[9]

Con­sid­er­ing the bib­li­cal account of the flood,^[10] the fig­ure becomes more pre­cise and its rela­tion­ship with time is out­lined, thus defin­ing its strate­gi­cal actions. The fig­ure of the ark and its strat­e­gy can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from the myth, where its the­o­ret­i­cal foun­da­tions lie; as in the case of the project for the Dan­teum by Giuseppe Ter­rag­ni, a spa­tial trans­la­tion of the three can­tos of the Divine Com­e­dy. Recourse to the nar­ra­tives of the begin­nings, such as mag­i­cal tales, myths and leg­ends, is deter­mined by the need not to suc­cumb to a real­i­ty that has become unbreak­able again (sim­i­lar to a dense flood, in fact). As Francesco Dal Co says in 10 Immag­i­ni per Venezia ​“real­i­ty often insin­u­ates itself into archi­tec­tur­al projects to the point of par­a­lyz­ing their ner­vous cen­ters and immo­bi­liz­ing their pos­si­ble reac­tions”.[11] Real­i­ty is the sole author of the scene and to refound the dis­ci­pline of archi­tec­tur­al design we need to observe and read about for­got­ten and ancient worlds. We were too con­cen­trat­ed on lis­ten­ing to urban­i­ty and its singers, but now that the city and the design cul­tures based on its log­ic is going through a peri­od of cri­sis, per­haps we need to re-start by writ­ing ​‘myth­i­cal’ new sto­ries[12].

In the Bible, the ark appears after an annun­ci­a­tion. Fol­low­ing the cre­ation of the world described in the first moment of Gen­e­sis, there is, in fact, a sec­ond begin­ning, an episode of the flood divid­ed into four moments: the caus­es; divine dis­po­si­tions and prepa­ra­tions; the flood; the new begin­ning of cre­ation. The sto­ry is well-known: God decid­ed to erad­i­cate mankind after its malfea­sances by send­ing a flood to wipe the slate clean. The flood, how­ev­er, does not spon­ta­neous­ly hap­pen but is announced to Noah who is giv­en instruc­tions to build an ark and to select all the good that remains of human­i­ty. The under­ly­ing project is that of a re-foun­da­tion, of the con­struc­tion of a sec­ond human­i­ty that suc­ceeds the first one, planned by means of a selec­tion of the trea­sures to be saved for the future (in the case of the Bible, ani­mals, seeds and a few men), and of an ark with­in which to hold the world­ly trea­sures until the flood subsides. 

The sto­ry begins with a val­ue judge­ment by the divin­i­ty regard­ing mankind. ​“The Lord saw that the wicked­ness of men was great in the earth” refers to a con­di­tion, in his eyes neg­a­tive, for which erad­i­ca­tion is nec­es­sary. Evil dri­ves the divin­i­ty to plan a ver­i­ta­ble tab­u­la rasa, the instru­ment for achiev­ing this had not yet been named, but it is announced that it will total…multitudinous: ​“I will wipe from the face of the earth the man I have cre­at­ed, and with man, also the cat­tle and the rep­tiles and the birds of the air.” In this first part, both the things that will be elim­i­nat­ed and the trea­sures that will be saved are pre­de­ter­mined. Then the divin­i­ty orders Noah to build an ark, giv­ing him real ​“instruc­tions for use”: mate­ri­als, con­struc­tion tech­nique, shape and mea­sure­ments.[13]

Once Noah has been warned, the flood is announced. It is not a sud­den or unfore­see­able cat­a­stro­phe, Noah is giv­en time to pre­pare and build the ark: ​“Behold, I will send the flood, that is, the waters, upon the earth, to destroy all flesh under heav­en, in which is the breath of life; all that is on the earth shall per­ish. But with you I estab­lish my covenant.” In essence, archi­tec­ture here takes on the val­ue of the sym­bol of an alliance between God and a part of human­i­ty cho­sen to trav­el towards the future, to explore anoth­er world: a mis­un­der­stand­ing wants the ark to be a con­ser­v­a­tive attempt, on the con­trary it is an explorato­ry device, it is an archi­tec­ture for explor­ing the ter­ri­to­ry and time ahead. The trea­sures to be saved are then defined, Noah and his fam­i­ly, the oth­er liv­ing beings ​“to pre­serve them alive”: ​“You shall go into the ark, and with you your sons, your wife and your sons’ wives. Of all liv­ing things, of all flesh, you shall bring into the ark two of each kind, to keep them alive with you: they shall be male and female”. Sev­en days lat­er the flood begins, which will last forty days and forty nights, the tem­po­ral pre­dic­tions are thus defin­i­tive­ly announced, the dura­tion of the ark and its ​“mis­sion” are planned.

The flood last­ed a total of one hun­dred and fifty days, sweep­ing away all liv­ing beings left on the earth. In the mean­time, Noah wait­ed inside the ark: ​“The waters were over­whelm­ing and grew far above the earth, and the ark float­ed on the waters.” The waters were all-con­sum­ing and cov­ered the high­est moun­tains that are under the whole sky. On the 150^th day, God remem­bers Noah and the ark and brings the flood to an end, the waters recede until the ark rests on Mount Ararat, in present-day Arme­nia.[14] Noah then sends two ​“explor­ers”, a raven and two doves, to check whether the earth was hab­it­able: the sec­ond dove brings back an olive leaf, the oth­er, sent sev­en days after the first, does not return. The earth is again dry, and the dis­man­tling of the ark begins, start­ing with the roof, ​“Noah took off the cov­er­ing of the ark”, and the exit from the ark ensued, ordered by the divinity. 

The sto­ry ends with the con­struc­tion of an altar and sac­ri­fi­cial offer­ings to sanc­tion the alliance between man and the divine. In this case the ark is the epic of life, it car­ries with it what is life and not what is past, while the flood puri­fies the earth. When the ark fin­ish­es its task, the covenant is sanc­ti­fied with a rain­bow, the ark is always for a world larg­er than itself: it is men who inhab­it it. 

With­in the sphere of the sacred Chris­t­ian and Hebrew scrip­tures is found a sec­ond ark, the Ark of the Covenant, sim­i­lar to Noah’s ark for­mal­ly, but dif­fer­ent in terms of its mis­sion: in this case the ark is a wood­en box used to store a divine trea­sure, no longer ani­mals and a few cho­sen men but the tablets of the law engraved by Moses under the dic­ta­tion of the divin­i­ty. The text of Exo­dus 25,10−22 is aimed at describ­ing the forms, mate­ri­als and inten­tions of the Ark of the Covenant, while its ​‘adven­tures’ run through­out the Old Tes­ta­ment, after its dis­ap­pear­ance from the Tem­ple of Jerusalem where it was ini­tial­ly con­tained. If Noah’s Ark fer­ries the world from a prim­i­tive con­di­tion to a bet­ter one, the Ark of the Covenant cross­es bib­li­cal land­scapes pre­serv­ing a trea­sure that must remain untam­pered – unchanged.

The exper­i­ments and projects adopt­ing the strat­e­gy of the ark open a twofold reflec­tion on the con­texts with which they relate: on the one hand, they present them­selves as a project of sal­va­tion and there­fore as coura­geous sym­bols of sur­vival; on the oth­er, as they must deal with spaces, move­ments, and uncer­tain­ties of a gigan­tic order, they open reflec­tions con­cern­ing their defense­less­ness, and final­ly on the pos­si­ble fail­ure of the archi­tec­tur­al project. There­fore, it’s not just a form of con­ser­va­tion, but also a search for the future, not so much an archi­tec­ture of secu­ri­ty but of reck­less­ness and explo­ration. Not­ing that every­thing changes dras­ti­cal­ly with­in a con­tin­u­ous cycle, the strat­e­gy of the ark returns an idea of design that devel­ops over an extend­ed peri­od of time, hence the reopen­ing of the remote future as a fur­ther time for archi­tec­tur­al design. The rela­tion­ship that this strat­e­gy has with time prof­fers ques­tions on the theme of pre­dict­ing the future, its tech­niques and tools, and thus on the rela­tion­ship between tech­nol­o­gy, mag­ic and sci­ence with­in the archi­tec­tur­al project. It is a ques­tion regard­ing the accu­mu­la­tion of unmiss­able trea­sures, of objects and lives, of goth­ic lines against the inva­sion of the out­side or of escapes ​‘in search’.

The strat­e­gy of the ark involves three moments that are orga­nized in time and to which cor­re­spond dif­fer­ent actions: the pre­dic­tion of a cat­a­stro­phe and the con­se­quent accu­mu­la­tion of goods to be saved; the sus­pen­sion of the inte­ri­or and its clo­sure through her­met­ic seal; the land­ing in the remote future and the lib­er­a­tion of the con­tents. In par­tic­u­lar, the theme of the seal takes on a dou­ble form and argu­ment in rela­tion to the ark’s strat­e­gy. On the one hand, it con­cerns the tech­nique of archi­tec­ture, that is, the abil­i­ty of a space, through one of its ele­ments and the mate­r­i­al of which it is made, to be defin­i­tive­ly closed and there­fore able to leave the out­side and the inside com­plete­ly sep­a­rat­ed, guar­an­tee­ing the iso­la­tion of the con­tent. On the oth­er hand, it con­cerns the con­struc­tion of the mys­tery or enig­ma as a pos­si­ble armor of the ark itself, there­fore its seal. Being defense­less against the flood that it is called to face, the ark presents itself as an ​‘obscured pres­ence’, it could be there but be invis­i­ble or go unno­ticed: in some way its ​‘her­meti­cism’ is designed to pro­tect it and pro­duce resis­tance to its inter­pre­ta­tion, there­fore to its open­ing. Con­sid­er­ing this, think­ing about the ark as an archi­tec­tur­al fig­ure, there­fore as a strat­e­gy of re-foun­da­tion of space, has as its first move­ment a ​‘de-foun­da­tion’. To set sail for oth­er worlds means to untie the ties that bind us to the earth, to the city, to our ancient struc­tures of thought but above all archi­tec­tur­al struc­tures (for exam­ple, the urban par­a­digm) that denounce an irre­versible cri­sis: it is there­fore a mat­ter of sav­ing some nec­es­sary and pre­cious things and at the same time for­get­ting every­thing else. 

There­fore, the first moment of the strat­e­gy con­cerns the deploy­ment of tools to antic­i­pate real­i­ty. New utopias are need­ed if not real prophe­cies, maybe even a new pact with futur­ol­o­gy^[15]; on the oth­er hand, we have to decide how much we need to save, to find what our new trea­sures and val­ues are. It is per­haps nec­es­sary to save the last things^[16] and the ​‘lat­est the­o­ries’: as in Kool­haas’ Sto­ry of the Pool.^[17] it is nec­es­sary to save the­o­ries and visions in order to antic­i­pate real­i­ty, to steal its time, to fore­see a pos­si­ble world by trans­port­ing them into the future in order to affect the sit­u­a­tion we will find.

The sec­ond moment sees the ark inside the ​“cat­a­clysm”: its task is to retain its con­tents, to float on the exist­ing, to take advan­tage of dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. The ​‘flood’, or the con­text upon which the ark oper­ates, is here­to inter­pret­ed through the dou­ble mean­ing of real­i­ty and metaphor: the flood is under­stood both lit­er­al­ly, like the phys­i­cal change of the ter­ri­to­ries, and like a spa­tial fig­ure sim­i­lar to an immer­sion in a mul­ti­plic­i­ty.[18] In the pre-flood peri­od, archi­tec­ture was pre­pared: a pact had been bro­ken between the divin­i­ty and man because the laws had not been respect­ed, so a flood was announced through a prophe­cy and an ark was built to store the trea­sures to be saved. The ark thus emerges as a fig­ure found­ed not so much on a cer­tain­ty but on a pre­dic­tion of a future that fore­casts an immi­nent tragedy with­in which it will have to ven­ture: the begin­ning of the ark fore­casts its next ​‘ene­mies’ lined up on the field. The con­fu­sion of lan­guages, of which the flood is a metaphor and a fig­ure, tells of a world that has become incom­pre­hen­si­ble because it is crossed by chaot­ic and ever-renewed dis­cours­es. Through metaphor, today’s dis­cov­er­ies in sci­ence and astron­o­my, new research into vir­tu­al space, and envi­ron­men­tal inva­sions of inhab­it­ed ter­ri­to­ries out­line a con­text in which the old world gives way to a new one, announced of course, but for which we have few design instru­ments. Inside the flood, arks are need­ed to save the essen­tial trea­sures that might be lost, and at the same time to explore the future, and there­fore there are two instances of the ark: the first is rad­i­cal preser­va­tion, the sec­ond is coura­geous explo­ration. Both instances speak of a space, that of the ark, which becomes the archi­tec­ture of antic­i­pa­tion and the expec­ta­tion of so-called ​‘bet­ter times’. 

The third moment of the ark is in the dis­tant future, cen­turies or mil­len­nia ahead of our time, and it is the ​‘release’. In the Holy scrip­tures and some trea­tis­es of the 15^th-16^th cen­tu­ry, the jour­ney of the ark ends at the ​‘fron­tier’, in a land where the flood has end­ed and where every­thing is renewed and puri­fied, essen­tial­ly in a con­di­tion that could not be ful­ly pre­dict­ed. At first, the open­ing of the ark takes place; the con­tents, which in the mean­time have been frozen or cul­ti­vat­ed, and which there­fore in turn have under­gone changes in the course of the jour­ney or the wait­ing, are freed and used to per­vade the con­di­tion found, to change it again, to affect it, or to build a new city, in any case to do a new project. The ark itself, accord­ing to some man­u­als, serves at this time as con­struc­tion mate­r­i­al and is dis­man­tled piece by piece, until it dis­ap­pears com­plete­ly. All that remains of it is its con­tents, its ​‘sense’ that it has been saved.[19] It is there­fore a ques­tion, with this strat­e­gy, of sus­pend­ing ​“the use of bod­ies”^[20] in order to bring to the fron­tier those trea­sures, if not also life, which will serve to refund new worlds in the future.

Fragments

In the design of an ark, lit­tle impor­tance is giv­en to the body of the archi­tec­ture: the real design, the sacred thing, is the con­tent to be placed inside. The choice of the ​“trea­sure” simul­ta­ne­ous­ly involves a uni­ver­sal and sin­gu­lar sphere, it is a mech­a­nism of par­tic­i­pa­tion: through choic­es and needs, two terms that return today to the vocab­u­lary of design, we build the future com­mu­ni­ty and its new val­ues.[21] Through­out its his­to­ry the archi­tec­tur­al project has been con­cerned with sav­ing cities, objects of affec­tion, the­o­ries, food and seeds, life itself; man has relied on mag­i­cal, divine places for his sur­vival, in the dream of an imper­ish­able exis­tence. Pop­u­la­tions have always used arks to store mate­ri­als or to accu­mu­late basic neces­si­ties, not only to set up new nar­ra­tives of life. Gra­naries, stor­age cities, and ice­box­es, for exam­ple, respond­ed to a need for sur­vival, to con­serve what could per­ish; in oth­er cas­es, how­ev­er, the con­tents are sacred and are put on hold for reli­gious rea­sons, as in the case of the Gausha­la in India, the tem­ples where sacred cows are fed and pro­tect­ed, or as in Jerusalem where the entire city is pro­tect­ed by the law on the sta­tus quo with respect to the use of mon­u­ments and relics that remain sus­pend­ed and with­out use for years.^[22] For exam­ple, the fortress of Sas­so­cor­varo, designed by Francesco di Gior­gio Mar­ti­ni in 1475, was used to res­cue works of art from the advanc­ing Ger­man Nazi army. The plan was to enclose major works of art from the Vat­i­can and Venice with­in this space in wait of bet­ter times, the archi­tec­ture was to save pre­cious con­tent while depriv­ing cities and ter­ri­to­ries of their pres­ence, essen­tial­ly to make space and to sim­u­late an untrace­able dis­ap­pear­ance. The fortress was specif­i­cal­ly cho­sen because it was in a dif­fi­cult to reach and unsus­pect­ed loca­tion. The works were sealed in a con­trolled atmos­phere, for more than ten years, only to be released at the end of the war. In this case, the remote­ness of the loca­tion con­tributes, togeth­er with the absence of an exit, to hid­ing the posi­tion of an archi­tec­ture that must not be traced. The absence of use, or rather its sus­pen­sion, rewrites the idea of preser­va­tion, tak­ing it to its extreme: some archi­tec­ture reemerges only to be for­got­ten again, their pro­posed mission—to serve as cav­i­ties hous­ing pre­cious objects until res­cued, to make them­selves avail­able as reserve spaces.[23]

With Sal­vatag­gi dei cen­tri stori­ci ital­iani (Italia vos­tra), Super­stu­dio is instead con­cerned with sav­ing entire cities from the inva­sion of real­i­ty, under­stood both lit­er­al­ly (the Flo­rence flood of 1966) and as a metaphor unleashed by it (the end of ratio­nal­ism): ​“To save in order to destroy, to destroy in order to save one­self; in times of apoc­a­lypse the extremes touch, the oppo­sites are equal. Don’t you see how every effort, every attempt to cor­rect errors, to repair dis­as­ters, to avoid destruc­tion, inevitably results in more irrepara­ble errors, in increas­ing­ly ineluctable destruc­tion?”[24] The projects envis­aged the con­struc­tion of mega-struc­tures: a dam encir­cles Flo­rence, accu­mu­lat­ing the waters of the Arno to sub­merge the city, a new Atlantis pre­served by immer­sion; Venice is drained of its sea and replaced by a glass-con­crete road; Milan is enclosed inside a cap­sule for the pro­duc­tion of fog; in Pisa, the entire build­ing is tilt­ed like its Tow­er; Rome is sub­merged by its waste; Naples is boxed in order to stage a total and time­less Neapoli­tan char­ac­ter. The metaphor of the ark is there­fore not used for its for­mal val­ue, it is not yet a ques­tion of say­ing ​“archi­tec­ture is a ship” or of build­ing ves­sels strand­ed in the land­scape, but to con­struct a strat­e­gy for res­cue and refoun­da­tion. The frag­ment, in this case rep­re­sent­ed by cer­tain cities, is not blocked but under­goes an upheaval that rad­i­cal­ly changes its sense and space. As in the salvif­ic project for the M.O.S.E. in Venice, the efforts to save an object of affec­tion can be super­hu­man; inside the long-await­ed ​‘freez­ing’ lies a real project that mod­i­fies the object of desire.

Group 9999’s project Apol­lo 1971 sounds prophet­i­cal­ly lit­er­al: ​“Final­ly, after the last hap­pi­ly end­ed Apol­lo Mis­sion, but which hasn’t done any good, our project is re-pro­posed to take our objects of affec­tion to the Moon.”[25] The short text accom­pa­ny­ing the project, com­posed of pho­to-mon­tages depict­ing the depar­ture, voy­age and arrival of a space fer­ry archi­tec­ture, is a jux­ta­po­si­tion of the bib­li­cal sto­ry of Noah’s Ark and a con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous sit­u­a­tion: the 9999s orga­nize their project around the immi­nent end of plan­et Earth and choose a few things to take to the Moon, the place cho­sen for the res­cue of the trea­sure. The list is short: a clas­si­cal tem­ple, sym­bol­iz­ing archi­tec­ture; the four ele­ments; an Ital­ian-style gar­den; an expe­ri­ence sim­u­la­tor.[26] The Moon is seen not as a space of refuge or escape but as an asep­tic ark whose absence of man allows the preser­va­tion of nec­es­sary things. 

Dizzy­ing lists of objects of sur­vival can also be piled up in arks intend­ed as ​‘collector’s rooms’ in par­a­dig­mat­ic cas­es of aug­ment­ed domes­tic spaces. John Soane’s house in Lon­don, for exam­ple, is an encrus­ta­tion of orig­i­nal works and copies, to tell anoth­er sto­ry, to enhance an archi­tec­ture that is com­plete­ly intro­vert­ed and to inhab­it mul­ti­ple times at the same time.[27]

The clo­sure inside, the col­lec­tion of ​‘mem­o­ra­bil­ia’, the selec­tion of the last things in the world, remains at the heart of today’s real arks, called upon not only to save things but to bring life itself into the future. In the Sval­bard Glob­al Seed Vault, a project launched in 2008, the most pre­cious seeds are select­ed to be saved. They are deprived of their pres­ence to be sent into the future. In this remote archi­tec­ture the seeds are stored in three sealed cham­bers at the end of a 125-metre-long tun­nel. The loca­tion was cho­sen with a tem­po­ral objec­tive in mind: it is thought that for two hun­dred years the per­mafrost of which the earth is made up will main­tain its prop­er­ties intact and thus act as a nat­ur­al refrig­er­a­tor, keep­ing the con­tents at a con­stant ‑18 degrees. The project is there­fore set up with a view to its pos­si­ble fail­ure or dis­man­tling: it is not cer­tain that the seals will hold, it is not cer­tain that the seeds will sur­vive. Unlike oth­er arks, the Sval­bard one is not designed as a lit­er­al time cap­sule, it will nei­ther be per­ma­nent­ly sealed nor hid­den from view but is used peri­od­i­cal­ly in case of wars and famines. In fact, the first open­ing took place in 2016, just eight years after con­struc­tion. The strat­e­gy of the ark is used here as an incur­sion into the near future, but the fact remains that an archi­tec­ture is used to save the exist­ing by depriv­ing itself of it for a giv­en peri­od and fer­ry­ing it towards a com­mon des­tiny. It is there­fore archi­tec­ture in wait­ing, hol­low spaces with­in the thick of the flood: by build­ing an ark we design a world in a box, a pre­fab­ri­cat­ed tomor­row with all its instruc­tions, in essence a future com­mu­ni­ty. The remain­ing frag­ments are our ​‘fun­da­men­tal acts’ with which we can design and write a ​‘Brand New Tes­ta­ment’.[28]

Architecture of Expectation 

The ulti­mate mis­sion of an ark is re-foun­da­tion by cross­ing of a sus­pen­sion of use. From the point of view of archi­tec­tur­al design the­o­ry, the ark revis­es Vit­ru­vian util­i­tas because, unlike the sta­tus quo of archi­tec­ture, which is always designed to be put into imme­di­ate use, it is designed in advance to be sus­pend­ed and used in the dis­tant future: it is an archi­tec­ture of expec­ta­tion. Accord­ing to its ety­mol­o­gy, ​‘expec­ta­tion’ means ​‘to aim’, ​‘to incline’, ​‘to aspire’. The notion there­fore implies two pri­ma­ry mean­ings: the first is that of lying down, a sort of aban­don with­out doing any­thing, wait­ing; the sec­ond is that of inclin­ing, aim­ing, aspir­ing, basi­cal­ly going towards, refer­ring to a ten­sion and a hope.[29] If we need­ed space, for exam­ple, the ark could be filled to free it and make it avail­able, in this sense it is a deposit and a reserve space in which the con­tent is put into dor­man­cy while wait­ing for the sys­tem to change. Like an enclave of time, the ele­ments that are housed in arks under­go a ​‘freez­ing’ or is ​‘nur­tured’ while wait­ing for the future.[30] The ark floats over places as they change, remain­ing ​‘in sus­pen­sion’, sealed but defense­less, hold­ing its con­tents. The wait­ing that the ark impos­es is there­fore an active time, a real project because in that sta­t­ic time frame some­thing hap­pens, the con­tent is marked by a change, the frag­ments inside the arks, seed­ing objects lives, are cul­ti­vat­ed to arrive tomor­row in a renewed con­di­tion. As in Mas­si­mo Scolari’s project for his Arca or The Col­lec­tor Room,[31] the ark is still but in the mean­time the flood acts and changes things. One draw­ing in par­tic­u­lar depicts Noah’s Ark strand­ed in a decom­posed ter­rain, bristling with rocks and excres­cences that could break its shell, placed tem­po­ral­ly a moment before the flood, wait­ing for its com­ing, or in the moment after its con­clu­sion, wait­ing for the open­ing. The author speaks of this project as a rea­son­ing between remem­brance and amne­sia, as an attempt to save some­thing pre­cious and at the same time to for­get some­thing no longer use­ful, as a space either of the expec­ta­tion of a future that must come, or as an attempt to escape towards it. This ark will then give rise to two oth­er fig­ures char­ac­ter­is­tic of the Ital­ian master's work, Glid­er and Tur­ris Babel, ​‘daugh­ter archi­tec­tures’ com­posed of a wood­en rib of the ark. The ark, then, as the con­struc­tion of an inher­i­tance, as the trans­mis­sion of knowl­edge, ​“the mes­sen­ger of new lands and new fig­ures”.[32]

But the theme of expec­ta­tion as a design tool is also deployed by the ark to trig­ger pos­si­ble cel­e­bra­tions of life at the end of time. In the last pages of his book Dark Ecol­o­gy, Tim­o­thy Mor­ton talks about a par­tic­u­lar ark archi­tec­ture to pro­tect the world from radioac­tive sub­stances with­out hid­ing them under the earth’s crust: ​“Maybe we should store plu­to­ni­um nei­ther deep under­ground with mil­i­ta­rized warn­ings nor in knives and forks with­out any warn­ing what­so­ev­er (this was actu­al­ly sug­gest­ed in the late 1990s). Let’s get small pieces of plu­to­ni­um, store them in a way that we can mon­i­tor them, and encase them in a sub­stance that will not leak radi­a­tion, above ground, so you can main­tain the struc­ture and so that you can take respon­si­bil­i­ty for it. You, the human, made the plu­to­ni­um, or you the human can under­stand what it is–therefore you are respon­si­ble. Let’s put these struc­tures in the mid­dle of every town square in the land. One day there will be pil­grim­ages to them and cir­cum­am­bu­la­tions. A whole spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of care will arise around them.”[33] The final image sketch­es a rit­u­al in which a crowd of peo­ple dance around a large build­ing con­tain­ing radioac­tive mate­r­i­al, placed in the mid­dle of a town as a mon­u­ment, caus­ing real rites of ado­ra­tion. In ques­tion is the pos­si­ble fail­ure of the project, the long-await­ed pre­dic­tion, if not also the arrival of the flood, might not come true, the ark and its wait­ing being ​‘use­less’. Damien Hirst’s 2017 exhi­bi­tion Trea­sure from the Wreck of the Unbe­liev­able,[34] how­ev­er, tells how even after a ​‘ship­wreck’, lost trea­sures can be col­lect­ed and used to rewrite a new sto­ry, giv­ing life to a new archi­tec­ture and a new nar­ra­tive. The ark is there­fore not an archi­tec­ture of extreme con­ser­va­tion of the frag­ment, but a strat­e­gy of explo­ration, a jour­ney in search of the fron­tier that uses cat­a­stro­phe to not lose the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mod­i­fy­ing real­i­ty. In this sense the ark appears as an archi­tec­tur­al epic cel­e­brat­ing life, set against a hori­zon in which the lit­er­al end of the world is fore­seen, or as an attempt to save the future, in any case a nar­ra­tive between gen­e­sis and apoc­a­lypse towards a new rebirth. In the light of the ark, then, there remains per­haps a note for the archi­tec­tur­al project: the pos­si­bil­i­ty, at the dawn of the new world, of being an act of re-foundation.