Warwickshire was chosen as the site for the construction of the new film archive, where in the middle of the 20th century one complex was already built for the storage of films. We are talking, first of all, about acetate and nitro-based films - the most fragile of all media in the cinema industry, which are equally afraid of excessive cold and moisture, and strong overheating.
And if half a century ago, special underground storage facilities, a kind of bunkers, were dug for their storage, now Edward Cullinan has designed a building that is unique in its engineering and structural properties, capable of ensuring the safety of films for a period of 50 years or more.
Kallinen himself emphasizes that without constant close cooperation with engineers, chemists and film institute experts, this project would hardly have happened. The microclimate created inside and the structure optimal for storing films were almost its main sections - the architecture, as it should be for the outer shell, "grew" at the very last moment. Rectangular in plan, the building consists of two types of cells - along the perimeter there are 30 small "compartments" intended for storing nitro-based films, and the central space between them is divided into six rectangular segments where acetate films are stored.
Technical rooms are attached to one of the ends of the building, in which engineering equipment is located, which maintains the required temperature (-5 degrees) and humidity (35%) in the archive, and on the opposite side there is a public block with a small cinema hall, meeting rooms, cafes and offices of archive workers … This part of the complex is clad with metal and covered with a sloping green roof and, while the main volume is made in concrete and has a purely technocratic appearance with numerous engineering boxes on the roof.
The construction of the new film archive building cost BFI £ 12 million. According to the management of the British Film Institute, these costs are more than justified, because the constant digitization of films is a very expensive event and at the same time does not guarantee 100% safety of the unique collection, which includes both British films (fiction and documentary) and film materials from Russia and China. as well as the most significant collection of American silent films outside of the United States.
A. M.
