The newest building to be occupied by the Library of Congress isn’t on bustling Capitol Hill but on a bucolic hillside in Culpeper, Va. The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center consolidates the library’s collection of films and recordings in a largely underground structure filled with climate-controlled vaults, isolated sound booths and an art-deco-style theater where movies will be screened for the public.
It brings together 5.7 million items representing the nation’s history of cinematic images and sound recordings since the 1890s, from silent movies and wax cylinders to Disney cartoons and compact discs. The archive also includes news reels, ethnographic films, television broadcasts and other documentary video and audio productions. The facility provides storage space for these originals as well as specially designed labs and technical spaces for their repair, duplication and transfer onto electronic media.
“The building is like a giant computer,” says Greg Lukow, chief of the library’s division of motion pictures, broadcasting and recorded sound. “It allows dramatic increases in the amount of our collections that we are able to digitize and preserve.”
Archives devoted to Hollywood films and Broadway musicals might suggest that this sprawling building complex has razzle-dazzle, but instead, the architecture is recessive, almost excessively so. The library’s preservation mission seems to have been taken literally in earth-covered structures symbolic of natural conservation. The only visible portion of the building consists of a curved, tiered facade framed by concrete loggias that eventually will be shielded by the ivy growing over them. Once this greenery is in place and saplings have grown on the hillside, the sod-roofed structures will blend further into their surroundings so as almost to disappear.
This architecture is only a slight improvement on the last building to be opened by the Library of Congress, the monolithic James Madison Building. That mute marble box, attempting to modernize classicism with skinny pillars and blank walls, was designed by DeWitt, Poor and Shelton Architects in the late 1960s. The new audio-visual center offers a similar modernist take on classicism in its spare loggias.
Architecturally, the design breaks no new ground but recalls such 1960s precedents as the Oakland Museum designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Kevin Roche in its similar treatment of concrete and green roofs.
Inside, however, its storage and conservation facilities are state-of-the-art in terms of building systems — stuff you don’t see such as air-conditioning ducts and acoustical insulation — and gadgets such as cassette-loading robots and vibration-free turntables. It’s too bad a sense of this technical advancement didn’t work its way onto the building exteriors.
Architects Earl Wilson of San Francisco-based BAR Architects and Hal Davis of Washington’s SmithGroup Inc. are responsible for the design, but the real force behind the project is its patron, David Woodley Packard. President of the Packard Humanities Institute and son of the late David Packard, co-founder of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, the philanthropist purchased the land in 1998 from the Federal Reserve Bank and footed the bill for design and construction of the $155 million, 415,000-square-foot complex. Last week, he officially transferred it to Congress, which has contributed $82.1 million for operations and upkeep. Now renamed the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, it is one of the largest private gifts ever given to the federal government.
“David’s input affected everything,” Mr. Wilson said during a tour last week. “He had an image of not wanting the building to be too overwhelming in the Virginia landscape.” Mr. Wilson collaborated with Mr. Davis and a team of architects and technical experts to organize the complex into three wings that are mostly buried under the hillside.
An existing bunker on the site, built by the Federal Reserve Bank in the late 1960s as an emergency shelter, was renovated into storage for most of the holdings to save costs. For 140,000 reels of flammable nitrate film, a separate underground wing was added to house 124 fire-protected vaults kept at a cool 39 degrees Fahrenheit. The four feet of earth covering this structure allow it to maintain a low temperature for several weeks should power be lost. Each vault is designed with its own fire-suppression system of sensing equipment and dampers to protect the volatile film, which hasn’t been produced since the 1950s. This chilly section of the building, lined with metal doors, has all the charm of a morgue.
Rising between these two underground structures is the visible, tiered conservation facility with office cubicles positioned toward views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This pleasant work area is one of the few places where sunlight enters the building and staff can enjoy the surrounding landscape through aluminum-framed windows and outdoor terraces under the concrete loggias. Technical spaces, including a film-processing lab and acoustically isolated chambers for digitizing sound recordings, extend to the rear of this wing under the hillside.
Visitors enter the conservation complex to the side where a soaring lobby is framed by concrete columns and a window wall offering a view of the reflecting pool — one of the building’s few Washington touches — in front of the loggia. White-oak panels on the walls, ceiling, reception desk and rounded staircase visually soften the rough concrete surfaces, adding a West Coast vibe. The wood-and-concrete space recalls 1960s institutional buildings like Mr. Roche’s Oakland Museum as well as the kind of corporate architecture that might be found in Silicon Valley, where Mr. Wilson’s firm has designed headquarters for several companies.
For the visiting public, the space that counts most in the building is the deco-style theater. It is separated from the lobby by a concrete wall with rectangular openings recalling the apertures for movie projectors, one of the few architectural references to the entertainment industry. A rounded marquee and reproductions of vintage movie posters lining the walls announce this space, which will open this winter with showings of film classics on two or three occasions. With 208 seats, it is small (the Uptown Theater, for example, has 840) but packed with old movie-house glamour.
Mr. Packard’s experience in restoring the 1925 Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, Calif., shows in features such as faux-grained woodwork, a plaster proscenium arch and opalescent glass light sconces. Glass chandeliers, reproduced from originals in the 1931 Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro, Calif., hang from a deep blue ceiling decorated with tiny stars. A Wurlitzer-style organ rises from a lift on the stage to accompany silent films. Watching them from within this jewellike auditorium will be worth the 1½-hour drive from Washington.
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