The Foundry Archive

Listed industrial buildings are usually ruined by their services. The fabric survives two centuries and then acquires a suspended ceiling, a plant room where the natural light was, and forty metres of surface-mounted trunking.

We spent the first six weeks of this project not designing the archive at all, but working out where the pipes would go.

One spine, everything in it

The answer was a single freestanding service spine running the length of the nave, built as an insulated timber box eight hundred millimetres deep. It carries ductwork, power, data, sprinkler mains and the archive's environmental monitoring. It also carries the lighting, which means no fixings into the historic brick anywhere in the main volume.

Because the spine is structurally independent, it is fully reversible. Undo the base fixings and the building returns to the state we found it in. That reversibility is what got the scheme through listed building consent without a fight.

Environmental conditions without a plant room

An archive needs stable humidity, which normally means mechanical conditioning and the plant to run it. Here the thermal mass of the foundry walls does most of the work: they are a metre thick at the base and swing very slowly.

We modelled a year of conditions before committing and found that a passive stack, tempered by a small trim coil in the spine, held the store within tolerance for all but around nine days a year. The client accepted a narrow mechanical backup for those days rather than sizing the whole system for them. The energy difference is roughly an order of magnitude.

The reading room

The reading room sits in the former pattern shop, the one part of the complex with north light. We did almost nothing to it: repaired the roof lights, laid a new floor, and put in twelve tables.

The best rooms in old buildings are usually already there. The work is finding them and then getting out of the way.

Visitor numbers in the first year ran at about four times the trust's projection, which has created a pleasant problem around booking that we are now helping them solve.