Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 39. (1986)
Archive Buildings and the Conservation of Archival Material. An Expert Meeting, held in Vienna, Austria October 30 - November 1, 1985 - BUCHMANN, Wolf: Planning an Archive Building. The Cooperation between Architect and Archivist
Planning an Archive Building 209 achieve the consent of all ministries involved. On June 24th, 1981 the budget commission of the Deutsche Bundestag finally accepted the calculation which gave a total cost of 78,000.000 DM. This date can be regarded as the date of the final approval for the new building of the Bundesarchiv. 4 4.1 Two different procedures can be used to select the architect to plan the building: a) a competition can be organized inviting architects to submit plans to a jury, which has to appraise the plans and propose one of them to be used for the construction; b) one architect can be directly commissioned to draft one or a limited number of plans, which have to be discussed, and one of them chosen by the archivists and the ministries involved. The importance, the costs and the size of a national archive building may justify the use of a competition in order to give each architect who is interested in participating in the task a chance to submit a plan. It must of course, be ensured that the archivists as the later users of this building are represented on that jury on the level of the experts and as members of the group of jury members, who give the final votes on the plans. This procedure enables the jury to choose among a multitude of plans having in mind the architectural quality of the building as well as the special needs of the archivists. In 1981 and 1982 155 architects participated in a competition to plan a new building for the “Deutsche Bibliothek”, the West-German central library, at Frankfurt. The task was difficult due to the building-site and the requirements of the librarians, but most of the plans were of an outstanding quality2). The opportunity to have a choice between a number of proposals rather than relying on one architect is an excellent argument in favour of such a competition. On the other hand, there are arguments against that way of proceeding. The costs are an aspect of minor importance. In the case of the “Deutsche Bibliothek” for example 400.000 DM were granted to the 13 architects, who had submitted the best proposals according to the judgement of the jury. A more important argument is the time necessary for the staging of a competition. This, in fact, was the reason why the Bundesarchiv accepted the decision of the Federal Ministry of the Interior to forego a competition. Again using the “Deutsche Bibliothek” as an example: the first meeting of the jury dealing with the description of the task took place on July 7th, 1981; the decision about the first place and the other prize-winners was made in a meeting from August 18th to 29th, 1982. Usually this should have been the final decision, but because the “Verwaltungsrat” (the managing board) of the “Deutsche Bi2) E. Holder — K. Nowak (Hgg.) Die neue Nationalbibliothek. Ergebnisse des Architektenwettbewerbs, Neubau der Deutschen Bibliothek in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main 1983). Mitteilungen, Band 39 14
