archive building - completed 2019
a-204
Waterline Depot
A document archive on a wharf, where the constraint was not the programme, the budget or the planners, but a groundwater level 2.1 m below the yard.
One copper stroke, as on every drawing in the register. Here it is the water table at -2.10.
Paper wants 18 °C and 50% relative humidity, held steady. Steadiness is easier below ground than above it, because the earth is a flywheel. On this site it was also harder, because the water table sits at -2.10 and the archive needed 450 m² of storage at a level that put its floor at -3.40.
The building is a tanked concrete box, poured in one continuous sequence with no day joints below the water line, inside a secondary drained cavity that discharges to two pumped sumps. Above grade there is a light steel-framed reading room and office, which is the part visitors see and by far the smaller half of the problem.
The section is the drawing that got the building consented, because it is the only one that shows the water table and the archive floor on the same sheet. It hangs framed in the reading room, and the copper line on it is the water.
- Site
- Easting Reach
- Client
- Easting Reach Records
- Programme
- Archive store, reading room, two offices
- Gross floor area
- 900 m², of which 450 m² below grade
- Lowest floor
- -3.40
- Water table
- -2.10, seasonal variation 0.4 m
- Structure
- Tanked in-situ concrete, steel frame over
- Environment
- 18 °C, 50% RH, ±2% over a year
- Completed
- 2019
Working on something this shape?
Send us the site, the budget and the constraint you think is fixed. The first thing we send back is usually a section, because that is where we find out whether it is.