Carmarthen Archives

This project was to design a new archive for Carmarthenshire and link it to the Carmarthen town library. The archives had been stored in a building which was not providing the correct conditions for storage and the decision had been taken to build a new purpose designed home for them.

Categories Education & Libraries
Client: Carmarthenshire County Council
Contractor: TRJ Construction
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Besides being in a central town location alongside a busy car park, the existing library building has a listed frontage and a 1970 rear extension. The site is located within the Carmarthen Conservation Area and alongside a scheduled ancient monument. There was archaeological intertest in the site as it was believed to be close to the Roman town walls. As a result, an archaeologist was on hand for the excavations with a watching brief and although some evidence of Roman occupation was uncovered work was then able to proceed. Foundations and levels were carefully designed to minimise excavation and potential disturbance to archaeological material.

The archive in Carmarthen is the first project we have worked on which is designed to meet Passivhaus standards. The building had to be extremely well insulated, carefully detailed, very airtight, very secure and have excellent fire proof qualities to meet the temperature and fire requirements. The airtightness level is excellent allowing temperature to be controlled accurately through controlled ventilation.

The building contains the archive on two floors with enough space to allow for future accruals for a number of years. The building also contains accommodation for the receipt cleaning, cataloguing and some document conservation along with a search room on the upper storey linked into the reference library. The reference library was also refurbished as part of the project and disabled access improved.

Aesthetically an archive causes some issues as it by definition is a box with no windows. Our solution was to use a combination of zinc and render cladding to separate the archive and the other accommodation. Due to its location within the Conservation Area, the choice of finishes available to us was limited and render was suggested. Stripes were introduced in the render of the archive to add visual interest and respect the vertical emphasis of the 1970s library extension.

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