Architecture in a Bottle. The Time Capsule as a Design-Driven Method for the End Times

The concept of apocalypse has remote origins, but thanks to the increase of catastrophic factors, the feeling that today the most probable end of the world is attributable precisely to human activities. However, since this perception is a product of the human mind, it seems to be a projection of man on the world, so the apocalyptic narratives appear to represent the fear of man's end in the world. While on the one hand, there is a debate on what strategies could be put in place to avert or postpone the advent of the catastrophe, on the other hand, there is the question of preserving the traces of a world that risks disappearing or being definitively compromised, with the aim of transmitting to posterity the signs of our existence as instruments of knowledge for the archaeologists of the future. The archiving operation sometimes seems to exhaust the transmission of memory, and architecture is a time capsule in itself. 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? What processes could be triggered in the contemporary world by the design of such an object? Archrypt intends to pass on to the humanity of the future the theories and disciplinary practices that have so far confronted with the paradoxical and apocalyptic aspects of reality at the end of time. Archrypt aims to be a critical-operational work on the need to transmit the memory of architecture through an architecture of memory. Archrypt refers to the ancestral dimension of architecture connected to its function of time capsule ante litteram.