Preservation has two meanings:  keeping something of value intact, protected, and free from decay, or, alternatively, preparing food for future use by preventing spoiling. To preserve ideas, things, and places is to slow the passing of time to maintain their original state. Preserving food, however, is to transform it. For example, through fermentation, food can be preserved via a metabolic process that generates new products from sugars through the absence of oxygen and the introduction of microbes. Static or active: to embalm or to pickle. The act of preserving spaces and objects is historically that of the embalmer, but, in a zymology of architecture, fermentation transforms them anew. In 2019, I worked in an architectural archive, where sketch models, material experiments, drawings, furniture prototypes, books, and artworks lined three floors of wood and acrylic vitrines: a wunderkammer of “waste products” of the architectural process. Inoperable windows and blinds were permanently drawn. I envisioned the contents of the archive fermenting, ideas and concepts transforming as people extracted new possibilities from the leftovers of architectural thinking.