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National Széchenyi Library Archive
National Széchenyi Library Archive
Piliscsaba, Hungary
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National Széchenyi Library Archive
Piliscsaba, Hungary
Firm
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2023
SIZE
100,000 sqft - 300,000 sqft
BUDGET
Undisclosed
Books are irreplaceable cultural objects, and, in countless copies, are a natural part of our everyday lives. Every country has a duty to preserve its written and printed culture for itself and the world. The preservation of printed materials - books, newspapers, publications, documents - is a cultural preservation act. Hungary has even adopted a law to underline the importance of this.
In 2017, the Government issued a decision on the realization of the National Széchenyi Library's new building, the Archive Warehouse. Such a national collection (as recommended by the European Union) involves a hermetically sealed warehouse that serves as a cultural treasury, containing one copy of every book printed from the 19th century to the present day (the "iron copy"), which can never be removed or borrowed, it can only be researched. Its purpose is to ensure that all the items in its collection are reproducible and digitized for national and world literature, so that it can be preserved for posterity.
The general designer of the building was TSPC Group while architect Attila Turi, who has been preparing the project for years, was responsible for the architectural and visual design.
The new Archive Warehouse is located in Piliscsaba, 20 kilometers from Budapest, the Hungarian capital. The National Knowledge Park is a large connected area in the middle of the Pilis Mountains, on the edge of the city, which includes a Research Park and university campuses. The 126-meter-long, 34-meter-wide, three-story warehouse was built at the highest point of the site in the shade of the trees, and not only had the functional requirement of being perfectly enclosed, but also has been designed to be hidden from view.
The architectural design and composition are inspired by the works of the renowned graphic artist Tibor Pataki. His book objects, the so-called artist books, are no longer significant because of the informal or artistic or literary textual content they convey, but thanks to the artistic expression and embodiment of the book as a symbol: it reveals the dimensions of a book that we can never see or experience when turning the pages or looking at the books in our hands.
The architecture was based on the duality of the simple functional need to safely store thousands of tons of paper and their priceless intangible value. The operation, technology and management system of such a building emphasize rationality, while its appearance and atmosphere enhance its role as a cultural preserver. Technology and art are linked together in this building in a harmonious way.
The mass formation of the building is defined by the storage and digitization and information processing block. The special safety, building physics (ventilation), fire protection (gaseous fire extinguishing system instead of water) and structural requirements of the warehouse required a large, strictly enclosed, windowless building. The 18 storage cells in the 10,000 square meter warehouse had to accommodate 84 kilometers of manually movable shelving, which can store nearly 3.5 million copies of books. The other part of the building include a restoration and binding laboratory and a digitization center as well as a special emergency storage facility. The latter serves to protect and evacuate Hungarian archives and libraries in case of temporary relocation or unexpected natural damage. A 15-meter high internal access tower connects these areas.
The shaping of the building is an attempt to combine the beneficial qualities of industrialized construction with enlarged craft forms. The alternately structured crust concrete surfaces of the building and the copper cladding that forms the backbone of the edifice, rising from the façade to the double-skin roof, which also contains special machinery, are the two basic elements of the concept. The open-worked copper wall of the main façade reflects the surrounding forest with its leafy structure, while recalling the metamorphosis: the paper made of wood returns to the forest in a printed form, with a higher quality. The pattern on the glass wall, the Süttő stone pavement of the interior corridor, is an enlarged pattern of the cellular structure of the tree trunks, transcribed into binary code. The breaking up of the huge mass with details and alterations to the cladding, the organic use and proportioning of different materials expressing a regionalism approach, all create a specific, exceptional concept.
In 2017, the Government issued a decision on the realization of the National Széchenyi Library's new building, the Archive Warehouse. Such a national collection (as recommended by the European Union) involves a hermetically sealed warehouse that serves as a cultural treasury, containing one copy of every book printed from the 19th century to the present day (the "iron copy"), which can never be removed or borrowed, it can only be researched. Its purpose is to ensure that all the items in its collection are reproducible and digitized for national and world literature, so that it can be preserved for posterity.
The general designer of the building was TSPC Group while architect Attila Turi, who has been preparing the project for years, was responsible for the architectural and visual design.
The new Archive Warehouse is located in Piliscsaba, 20 kilometers from Budapest, the Hungarian capital. The National Knowledge Park is a large connected area in the middle of the Pilis Mountains, on the edge of the city, which includes a Research Park and university campuses. The 126-meter-long, 34-meter-wide, three-story warehouse was built at the highest point of the site in the shade of the trees, and not only had the functional requirement of being perfectly enclosed, but also has been designed to be hidden from view.
The architectural design and composition are inspired by the works of the renowned graphic artist Tibor Pataki. His book objects, the so-called artist books, are no longer significant because of the informal or artistic or literary textual content they convey, but thanks to the artistic expression and embodiment of the book as a symbol: it reveals the dimensions of a book that we can never see or experience when turning the pages or looking at the books in our hands.
The architecture was based on the duality of the simple functional need to safely store thousands of tons of paper and their priceless intangible value. The operation, technology and management system of such a building emphasize rationality, while its appearance and atmosphere enhance its role as a cultural preserver. Technology and art are linked together in this building in a harmonious way.
The mass formation of the building is defined by the storage and digitization and information processing block. The special safety, building physics (ventilation), fire protection (gaseous fire extinguishing system instead of water) and structural requirements of the warehouse required a large, strictly enclosed, windowless building. The 18 storage cells in the 10,000 square meter warehouse had to accommodate 84 kilometers of manually movable shelving, which can store nearly 3.5 million copies of books. The other part of the building include a restoration and binding laboratory and a digitization center as well as a special emergency storage facility. The latter serves to protect and evacuate Hungarian archives and libraries in case of temporary relocation or unexpected natural damage. A 15-meter high internal access tower connects these areas.
The shaping of the building is an attempt to combine the beneficial qualities of industrialized construction with enlarged craft forms. The alternately structured crust concrete surfaces of the building and the copper cladding that forms the backbone of the edifice, rising from the façade to the double-skin roof, which also contains special machinery, are the two basic elements of the concept. The open-worked copper wall of the main façade reflects the surrounding forest with its leafy structure, while recalling the metamorphosis: the paper made of wood returns to the forest in a printed form, with a higher quality. The pattern on the glass wall, the Süttő stone pavement of the interior corridor, is an enlarged pattern of the cellular structure of the tree trunks, transcribed into binary code. The breaking up of the huge mass with details and alterations to the cladding, the organic use and proportioning of different materials expressing a regionalism approach, all create a specific, exceptional concept.
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