THE CRYONIC CASTLE.(architect's efforts to find land on which to build facility for Life Extension Foundation)

When Stephen Valentine talks to real-estate agents, he uses a made-up name. He doesn't want them to say that no land is available because they have looked him up and don't like the sound of his project. He tells them that he represents a biotech company. He doesn't say what the company plans to build, but he gives the impression that it is a factory or a headquarters, and that for the sake of security the company would like it to be surrounded by a few hundred acres of empty land. He tells them that the site "has to be inspirational." He asks them to imagine that the Pope is building a summer palace. The real-estate agents often refer him to state agencies whose purpose is to attract biotech companies, and sometimes he ends up leaving New York, where he lives, and being met at an airport by friendly people who have a big helicopter.

Valentine is an architect. He has worked for I. M. Pei. At Pei's office, he took part in designing the Jacob Javits Center, in New York, and he was one of four architects on the initial design team for the Holocaust Museum, in Washington, D.C. Typically, architects are given a site and asked to design a building to occupy it. In 1997, Valentine was asked by a man named Saul Kent to draw up plans for a building he had no property for. Kent lives in California and has a company called the Life Extension Foundation, which sells health products and supports research intended to help people live extravagantly long lives and maybe not die at all. Finding a site is a matter that he has left to Valentine.

Kent wanted a building sufficiently stable that it could operate continuously for at least a hundred years, a condition that no building in the world can satisfy. Buildings designed to remain standing after an earthquake, for example, are not expected to do so without having to be shut down for repairs. The bunkers that countries build to protect their leaders are not intended to perform without fail for a century. Usually, they are abandoned for new ones after twenty-five years. Robert Ducibella, a security consultant at Ducibella Venter & Santore, whose clients include the Statue of Liberty, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve banking system, former President Clinton, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center), has studied Valentine's models and drawings and is impressed by the novelty of the project's complications. "There are buildings built by academic institutions that need to preserve cultural collections for a hundred years, maybe, but the expectation is that fifty years is more likely," he says. "There are medical facilities that have reserves they need protected, the Food and Drug Administration wants its records preserved, the Federal Reserve doesn't want its resources tampered with, and Social Security doesn't, either. There are aspects of this building in other buildings, but nowhere else in the world can they all be found in one place."

Valentine calls his building the Timeship. It will enclose seven hundred thousand square feet, some of which will be built underground, and it will cost about two hundred million dollars, a portion of which is already in hand and the rest of which Kent hopes to raise by donation. The building's plans include premises for an organ bank, laboratories for research devoted to anti-aging science, archives of DNA from extinct and near-extinct species, and nearly fifty thousand people who have been frozen in the hope that they can be brought back to life in the future. The Timeship is low and square, with a huge circular wall around it. Beyond the wall are eight rings of concrete whose widths increase according to the golden proportion, a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. In the center of the Timeship, and visible above the wall, is a tower in the shape of a cone, whose summit is intersected by a second cone, which is inverted. Around the base of the tower is a large square plaza. A mist so fine that a person walking through it will not get wet will drift through the plaza. The mist is intended to contribute an ethereal atmosphere--"the intermediate world between the formal and the non-formal," Valentine writes in the building's proposal. In the air above the plaza, the mist will form clouds, representing "the abode of the gods of creation." The outside of the wall has a zigzag pattern meant to suggest flames and thunderbolts and the notion that "to pass through fire symbolizes transcending the human condition." The people will be stored in containers below the plaza, in private areas called neighborhoods.

Valentine believes that the Timeship must be built in a beautiful landscape, otherwise people won't think of it as an appealing place to spend what might be eternity. He wanted to build the Timeship in Tuscany, but he decided that the United States is more likely than Italy to be politically stable for the next hundred years. He has been looking at sites for two years, and he estimates that he has seen hundreds of them. He has narrowed his search to four states, but, except to say that all of them are in the lower half of the country, he won't tell which they are. He eliminated the other forty-six by mapping the hazards and threats they contained. His maps took account of earthquakes, snowfall, rock slides, avalanches, tornadoes, hailstorms, flash floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, sinkholes, lightning strikes, rogue glaciers, and showers of meteors. He also made note of weaknesses in the ozone layer, sources of geothermal energy, wind patterns, pockets of radon gas, rising water levels, concentrations of lead and other ...