Description

The archives building for the Département d’Ille-et-Vilaine on the outskirts of Rennes is a carefully conceived, expressive composition, characterised by artistic ambition on the one hand and conceptual precision on the other. As with the architects’ earlier work for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the two central gestures here are the long bar of the magazine building and the sunken exhibition hall. The archives are behind a glass front and the hall for temporary exhibitions under a glass roof. From afar, one sees only the elongated archive building as a dark, geometric volume. The city of Rennes has been expanding into the valley of Beauregard with other administrative buildings, and the long barrier of the archive building can be read as marking the end of this new administrative quarter.
The 140-metre-long building is set back slightly from the road and sits like a four-storey showcase atop a plinth that rises out of the asphalt surface above the parking level. The dark asphalt appears dull and matt beneath this first continuous band of black, reflective glass and metal on which the rest of the building is seated. The archive stacks above lie behind continuous corridors that run directly behind the regular glazing of the façade, and the concrete corridor wall, visible through the glass, announces the building’s function in house-high red letters. The volume of the building is hard to ascertain because its contours do not stand out clearly against the sky. The entrance in the smooth dark base of the plinth is likewise not immediately discernible, creating the impression of the archives as a world of its own, red and black, mysterious and promising.
Inside is an area for the public at ground level and the archive stacks on successive upper levels, accessed by two entirely separate path systems. The first is for public access and is restricted to the plinth level as an open, inviting means of accessing records that is additionally illuminated by internal light-well courtyards. The second is a purely technical means of access that begins at the technical centre in the plinth where documents are delivered, registered and processed, and expands across the six levels of stacks.
These two independent spatial programmes meet at a single point: the reading room, placed logically at the centre of the complex. This dual organisation reflects a development seen in all public archives in recent years. What was previously exclusively a repository has increasingly opened up to citizens, who come here to research historical data or local stories. The inaccessible departmental storerooms have transitioned into public documentation centres with lounges and reading rooms. Consequently, the archives of the Département d’Ille-et-Vilaine has sufficient space for 60 archivists and many more visitors.
The reading room is the transparent heart of the building arranged between two courtyards with 170 workstations under a glass roof. A glass wall divides the space into two halves, a reference library, and a space reserved for studying original documents. The furniture, specially designed by the architects and made in Veneto, includes 12-metre-long tables, monumental shelves and 14-metre long continuous benches. Satin-finish stainless steel surfaces enclose a honeycomb-like core, with seamless connections.
Automatically controlled fabric blinds regulate light from above. The 700 m² roof has only a slight pitch, and the externally bonded glass surfaces are held in place by self-draining Schüco frames, in which the building services are concealed.
The dark base also houses an exhibition hall of 230 m², the educational services in a further 230 m² and the archivists’ offices. Six inner courtyards are sliced out of this volume and are enclosed by floor-to-ceiling glazing of the same modular size as the external glazing. The approximately 1-metre-wide panes are a mix of fixed and movable panes, and correspond to those of the external glazing, except for their height, which is 3.20 metres in the stacks and 4.20 metres in the plinth level. Their comparatively narrow width allows the frames to be kept as narrow as possible (16 mm in the elevation). This detail was developed together with the manufacturer Schüco. The modular arrangement of the panes emphasises the layering of the programme: the five floors contain 45 sections of 172 m² each, and the ceilings are designed for a load of 1700 kg/m². The stacks comprise fixed and roller racking shelving in equal parts, providing an overall total shelving space of 78 linear kilometres.

Originally published in Bauwelt  14.2007, pp. 18-25, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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