The proposed project is an Archive of Work for the Eurometropolis area of Lille-Tournai-Kortrijk. It stores physical and digital records from the region’s professional activities with an ambition to make its collected knowledge accessible.
The area balances between a post-industrial identity, characterized by coal mining and textile factories, and a new strategic placement as the ideal investment location for business and services like logistics, design and information technologies. This shift from the primary and secondary sectors of economy to services related to digital technology, is also reflected in the collected material.
Higher educational institutions developed parallel to the previous industrial development in order to provide research in the same fields. Today, research centers try to link again education with the contemporary growth of digital production and commerce. The Archive of Work is the mediating partner between industry and education. While serving its administrative function, it serves as a bridge between the past and the future. By becoming an integrated part of the educational system, the archive can offer its collected knowledge for further research in the professional world against the region’s high unemployment.
The chosen site for the archive is the disused freight station Gare Saint Sauveur, centrally located in Lille. This location places the archive among the civic buildings of the city, like the town hall, the museum and the library, suggesting its urban nobility, as one of the main public institutions. Located along the horizontal boulevard connecting the new master planned area with the existing city, the Archive serves as a gate, joining the former industrial site with the urban fabric. This position sets the Archive as a monumental institution in the city center of Lille.
The building consists of eight floors, organized in two volumes with a cut in-between them. Precast concrete panels create a closed envelope, providing insulation for the storage rooms while thin window slits, indicate the accessible spaces within. Concrete’s austerity and roughness communicate the building’s industrial content, despite its mute and closed exterior.
Archives operate with a clear separation between storage and human accessible areas, clearly outlining circulation paths of the archived material, the working staff, and the visitors. In the proposed building, the public areas are not separated, but placed in-between the storage rooms to evoke an interaction with them. From the closed ground floor, a public ascending route leads the visitor to the middle part of the archive, an elevated square, offering views above the city. From this space that can serve as a meeting place, one can explore the rest accessible parts within the facility, placed in various levels around the vertical voids, in conjunction with the stored formats.
The project is altering the archive, from a storage infrastructure to a productive educational facility. This new character can transform the institution from a collection of dead objects, to an active organism, providing a space for reflection and gathering for the community while transmitting its collected knowledge.
Propositions
1. The archive is not an administrative storage facility, but an educational institution and thus it should be open to the public.
2. The archive, as a civic building, belongs to the cultural and educational facilities of the city, the library, the university and the museum.
3. Industry and education used to be more closely related, as research would explore for production.
4. The Archive of Work is necessary to bridge industry and education, as without understanding the labor of the past, it’s difficult to innovate in the present high-tech economy.
5. The archived elements are not objects of a museum, but they can only be understood through activation. The archive provides the necessary facilities to comprehend and interpret the data in order to produce new knowledge from it.