Cologne Archives (competition)

Status: 2011 (commendation)
Location: Cologne, Germany

Client: City of Cologne
Value: Confidential

 

Archives and libraries are organised around opposites. On the one hand, preservation, protection, security; on the other accessibility and handling of original documents.

Our scheme examines the contrast between the solid presence of the Archive and the light-filled spaces of reading rooms and public areas. The Archive’s importance as a repository for the memories of the city is made visible externally in its presence as a single volume elevated above ground level across the length of the site. As a Citizens’ Archive, accessibility of both the Archive and Art Library to the city is expressed in the transparency and openness of the ground floor, and the organisation of public spaces on a single level accessible along an internal street.

For study, documents are taken from the darkness of the archive down to light-filled spaces for reading and research: a movement that recalls the metaphor of learning as a process of illumination and enlightenment. For conservation, they are brought up from the archive to the naturally lit workshop areas above. Throughout the public areas on the ground floor, shafts of light are cut through the volume of the archive above, the direction of the light falling from above mirroring the movement of contents from the archive to the reading and exhibition areas below. Within the Art Library, light connects the readers with the natural setting of the proposed park, and is filtered through a timber louvred facade to exclude sunlight.

Foyer areas are more fully glazed, animated by natural light, but protected from direct sunlight during the summer by deep cantilevers above.

Like libraries and archive collections, brick buildings are monolithic constructions assembled from thousands of small individual volumes. This is the character of our proposal, where bricks themselves are laid on end like books on shelves. Where volumes have been removed, the surface takes an open highly textured, almost delicate, appearance, allowing in light and ventilation to pass through. This is most evident on the upper floor of the building where the solid façade becomes an open screen in front of the workshops. Clay is the material of some of the earliest structures and some of the earliest written records, the cunieform tablets of ancient near east. It is a material where each block retains the marks and memories of the casting process.

The use of brick extends into the paving of landscape and foyer areas and the soffits of public spaces, emphasising the solidity and permanence of the building. This is complemented by the use of timber joinery, walling and wood block floors within the working and permanently occupied areas of the building, giving these areas a warm, tactile and acoustically sympathetic quality. This joinery is expressed externally in the facades at ground and first floor level where it is articulated in a manner reflecting the stacked forms of the brick facades above.