Massimiliano Fuksas won the international competition for the best design of the new building for the main archive of France back in 2005, beating more than 120 competitors. The implementation of the winning project took almost eight years, and although during this time the complex managed to slightly increase in size (in total, it grew by almost 20 thousand square meters), the architect's original plan as a whole was preserved.
Since, in addition to the actual repository of historical documents, the archive was supposed to include administrative premises and a conference center, Fuksas initially made the complex 2-private. And if the architectural solution of the building, which housed the state acts of France for the last 300 years, by virtue of its function, is quite predictable, then its counterpart, the author tried to give a memorable appearance. The archive building - a laconic, almost deaf volume, lined with diamond-shaped aluminum panels - is pushed into the interior of the site and serves as a kind of backdrop for the building with offices and a conference center, which for it "connects with the world."
The lower floors of the administrative building are made completely transparent, and on the three upper floors the architect pulled an openwork metal mesh - the diamond-shaped pattern of the cells visually makes it similar to the blank facade of the storehouse, while emphasizing the fundamentally different nature of this building. The openness of this building is intended to emphasize its plasticity even more: the upper floors are strongly displaced relative to each other, thanks to which the building received a whole system of dynamic consoles and developed terraces and began to resemble a casually folded pile of books.
Fuksas has landscaped the space between the buildings with decorative pools decorated with sculptures by Anthony Gormley. The reading room located on the first floor of the repository also faces one of these reservoirs: in order to provide the researchers working there with daylight, several metal panels of the facade cladding have been replaced with diamond-shaped glass.
A. M.
