Indiana State Archives

Completed as BIM Manager and Project Manager for Marlon Blackwell Architects

The Indiana State Archives collects, preserves, and makes available for public use historical and evidential materials relating to Indiana. In all, the Archives houses over 110,000 cubic feet of permanently valuable materials containing millions of individual items. These records date from the territorial period to the present.

The goal of the project was to house the relocation of the entire state archive in a new facility that is more centrally located in the heart of Indianapolis. The current state archive is housed in a facility that is dated and difficult to access from the state capitol limiting the states inhabitants’ access to the resources housed within the collections. The new facility would need to fulfill two primary requirements. Firstly, the project needed to house the collections in a highly controlled, easy to access, warehouse storage space with room to grow and secondly, the project must provide offices for staff with adjacent spaces for the general public to view and study the state’s vast collections. This second requirement asks that the project have a civic and inviting presence not only at the street level but also within the building’s entry, atrium, and reading room.

The project accomplishes all the above by moving and elevating the collection storage space to the back of the site, giving the staff and public access to the building at the street level. The collections storage features the latest technology used by fulfillment centers through the use of robots and automated storage to move the pieces of the collection throughout the building. The public entry from the street is under a large public porch that allow the public to move away from the busy street under the coven of the building before entering the large multi-story public atrium. After moving up the large public stair the public can enter the large volumetric reading room to be greeted by staff and interact with the states vast collection.