Built

Hall of Records

[01] Brief

A municipal archive designed as a vault you can walk through. Two metres of concrete protect three centuries of civic memory.

Location

Rotterdam, Netherlands

Year

2023

Typology

Civic

Area

6,400 m²

Status

Built

Client

City of Rotterdam

Coordinates

51°55′N 4°28′E

[02] Narrative

Architecture as a safe

The Hall of Records stores the city’s birth, marriage and property registers. The brief asked for a climate-stable vault; we added a public route that threads between the stacks, so citizens can see their history being kept.

The facade is a 2-metre-deep wall of precast fins. Its thermal mass keeps the archive at 18°C year-round with almost no mechanical cooling.

Recognition

Dutch Concrete Award 2024, shortlisted for the Mies van der Rohe Award.

[03] Plates

Next project →

Quarry Chapel