Archives New Zealand

Archives Aotearoa stakes a dominant position in New Zealand’s Parliamentary Precinct, once home to Indigenous Māori displaced for the creation of the government precinct. Embracing and acknowledging the past, the architecture is an embodiment of a visual challenge to the Crown, demanding a more meaningful and honest conversation on our controversial history and ongoing recognition of the treaty between peoples (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) into our future. Archives Aotearoa is physically connected through a bridge link to the adjacent National Library of New Zealand, the two facilities combine to form a new and cohesive heritage campus preserving and providing access to the ‘Evidence of New Zealand’. As the storehouse component, Archives Aotearoa houses 9,000m2 of specialist environmentally controlled collections storage space over five floors wrapped in an opaque high performance facade, providing a unique opportunity to celebrate the pure mass and gravity of the function and the identity of Archives Aotearoa. The strong building form draws inspiration from a traditional storehouse for precious treasure (pātaka), elevating the repository and boldly declaring its importance with dramatic use of metallics and exquisite ornamentation. The mass of the Tuanui impresses the gravitas of the archival material on the visitor through and the overarching sense of weight and compression. Below the ground, the ’Tuapapa’ is curvaceously carved from the terrain, embedding the building and immersing it into the ‘whenua’ (land). With the main public interface located in the adjacent National Library building, the entry to Archives (Ātea) is a small, crafted space compressed between the ground and the elevated storehouse, a place for purposeful and intimate engagement between the community and Archive’s technical experts. The opaque façade acts as a heat shield reducing temperatures within the collection spaces and prohibits daylight, at the same time providing a unique opportunity to proudly display a 4000m2 artwork celebrating cultural narrative and identity - a bold and unashamed expression of the physical and conceptual weight this institution carries. To ensure long term resilience this design pushes the limits of technical performance with the largest seismic movement in the southern hemisphere, this legacy project will retain its performance well beyond the effects of a significant earthquake. Archives Aotearoa sets a new benchmark as one of the most resilient, technically complex, high performing and culturally significant buildings completed in New Zealand in 2025. Scale, innovation, sustainability and identity are celebrated in Archives Aotearoa. With the intentional expression of function and purpose of this facility, it unashamedly marks the cultural and social role it plays in the identity of our nation.