An Archive Without Archives: Civilisation Should Not Be Preserved as Scenery

Last month, while revisiting several buildings in Hangzhou that I had photographed years ago, I visited the newly completed Hangzhou National Archives of Publications and Culture.

Compared with Amateur Architecture Studio’s more experimental work, the building left me slightly disappointed. Aesthetically, it is hard to fault. Concrete columns, celadon screens, timber eaves, rocks and trees compose a calm contemporary Chinese shanshui landscape. At moments, it does recall the depth and distance of a Song painting.

Yet this beauty also conceals a certain conservatism. For a national cultural institution, dignity and restraint are understandable. But from a practice known for material and constructional experimentation, such a safe spatial language feels like a missed opportunity.

More importantly, the building never makes the idea of archives, editions, preservation or time truly perceptible. Most collections are presumably hidden in storage; the few books and documents on display appear as conventional exhibits in glass cases. The public areas feel more like a refined garden than a place of cultural backup. The same space could almost be a museum, hotel lobby, or cultural salon.

The V&A East Storehouse in London suggests another possibility: storage, research, conservation and public viewing are allowed to overlap. Visitors can see how objects are kept, moved and studied. Preservation becomes a visible public process.

Hangzhou’s version is elegant, but it keeps the archive behind a wall. It succeeds as a modern garden, yet not quite as an architecture of memory, time and civilisation.