27 January 2021 · By Fran Williams
Projects seldom come so freighted with history or as laden with expectation as Lambeth Palace Library, which was recently completed to stringent specifications, writes Fran Williams. Photography by Hufton + Crow
Lambeth Palace’s Wright & Wright-designed £23.5 million national library and archive for the Church of England has long been anticipated. Now due to open formally on a yet-to-be-announced date later this year, it was one of the AJ’s top 5 buildings to look out for in 2020. This is a flagship project for a practice which excels at institutional architecture and, in terms of time and budget, it is certainly a plum commission.
Timing the visit just before lockdown no. 2, I am shown around the building as its ‘special collections’ are still being moved in and unpacked, box-by-box, into the archives as part of a slow, careful and exceptionally organised six-month process, which also includes a box-cleaning programme.
Wright & Wright’s extensive experience of designing libraries in sensitive historic locations for colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge no doubt assisted its prospects of selection for the project by the Church Commissioners for England in December 2015, ahead of big names in a shortlist including Zaha Hadid Architects. Sited in the garden of the Grade I-listed Lambeth Palace (the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury) on the south bank of the River Thames, the 5,400m2 new building has been specifically built to house archives which, after the Vatican’s, are considered the most important collection of religious books and manuscripts in Europe.
Lambeth Palace Library, which was founded in 1610 by Archbishop Richard Bancroft and is one of the earliest public libraries in the UK, holds about 200,000 printed books – 30,000 dating from before 1700 – plus more than 5,000 manuscripts (600 Medieval) as well as the correspondence of the Archbishops of Canterbury in an unbroken sequence from the 1860s onwards. As Wright & Wright director Clare Wright puts it, the collection ‘covers every aspect about pretty much everything’. With books crammed into every nook and cranny in the ageing Tudor library, the collection was ‘destroying the building’ she adds, underlining the need for a refurbishment, with an additional requirement for improved public access.
The library will house archives which, after the Vatican’s, are considered the most important collection of religious books in Europe
The new red-brick monolithic block takes the shape of a kinked ‘occupied wall’ along Lambeth Palace Road, its mass formed of four and five-storey wings rising to a nine-storey central tower crowned by a viewing platform. This arrangement both animates the palace’s skyline viewed from the river and screens its garden from traffic noise and pollution. Inside, unlike its predecessor, it is organised and spacious, its entire collection having space to breathe. The key design move has been to elevate the historic collection against the potential risk of flooding. Its layout is organised around a double-height entrance hall containing reception and exhibition areas and a ground-floor public reading room, along with offices for up to 30 library staff on this and the first floor, all overlooking a garden. The Upper Room above, designed for seminars and other functions, sits between the two wings of ‘concrete bunker’ archives. A specialist conservation studio, accommodating up to eight full-time conservators, plus seminar and teaching rooms, are also incorporated into the plan.
An archive is a specialised building type. Particular consideration is required with respect to exhibition design, fire prevention, and environmental control, as well as simply providing enough efficient room for the entire catalogue and up to 15 years of projected expansion. Wright & Wright’s scheme also sets out to be very green, aiming for a BREEAM Excellent rating. ‘It’s passive in lots of ways,’ says Wright. Precise temperature and humidity levels are essential for the conservation of historic manuscripts and so a hybrid H&V strategy has been implemented in the concrete archive bunkers, allowing for seasonal fluctuations within a range, but with plant providing temperature and humidity adjustments (and air circulation) when needed.
‘It might seem odd to build within the Archbishop’s garden,’ says Stephen Smith, another partner at the practice. Only taking up 3 per cent of the now-shared garden, the new library has been designed to minimise its footprint on the grounds, remaining 300m away from the palace by cleaving to the line of the road. This positioning has helped to enhance the garden’s ecology by accommodating a new and enlarged pond and wetland glade – designed with landscape architect Dan Pearson Studio. All was designed with the added intention of sharing the view of the pond with the Evelina London Children’s Hospital across the road, creating a sense of peace and respite for its staff and visitors.
As the repositories of an institution’s accumulated knowledge and lore, libraries and archives are often the pivotal buildings on an estate and occupy positions of prominence. At Lambeth, the library takes a castle-like form, making links with the palace’s Tudor gatehouse, Morton’s Tower, just a little way further south along Lambeth Palace Road, and with the tower of the Garden Museum, reconstructed from St Mary-at-Lambeth by Dow Jones Architects in 2017. At nine stories tall at its highest point, Lambeth Palace Library has been designed to be part of a monumental ensemble on the London skyline as seen from the water’s edge.
With four different building types thrown into the mix, one way the building has achieved this monumentality is through the abundant use of homogeneous walls of red brick, standing out against the grey of London. Quoting Frank Lloyd Wright’s aphorism ‘give me this brick and it will be worth its weight in gold’, Wright and Smith recall how brick and the way it would be used was continuously at the forefront of design discussions. Smith jokes: ‘At one point, we had all of the different brick bonds in the scheme.’ Indeed various brick arrangements break up and give texture to the library’s vast walls, while retaining its overall simplicity of form.
Commenting on its aesthetics, Wright observes: ‘We like picking up on other people’s themes.’ One notable reference adopted here is to Alvar Aalto’s 1949 Säynätsalo Town Hall, where red brick is similarly perceived through trees. Other case studies and research informing the project are bound together in a book of essays, Special Collections, edited by Clare Wright and Catherine Slessor, which records the layers of refinement in the design process.
The building has achieved its monumentality through the abundant use of homogeneous walls of red brick
‘Heavyweight and thick-skinned buildings’ typical of monasteries and medieval architecture generally are, as Wright remarks, something of a theme in the practice’s output. At Lambeth the library’s entrance has hefty interior walls whose mortar joints change from bucket-handle to raked to modulate their acoustic properties. Above is a dramatic cruciform concrete ceiling. Religious connotations apart, it is the engineer’s response to an extremely high spec for a structure to carry the load of books above. The ceiling’s exposed concrete finish adds to the gravitas of the project and demonstrates the importance of ‘heaviness’ in the aesthetic. Yet when the sun is out, light reflected from the pond’s surface dapples across it, creating a calming ambience in contrast with the busy road just outside and the acoustic difference in this space is satisfactorily calming.
One of the great delights of the building is the conservation studio on the ground floor. Resembling a studio workshop, Wright and Smith joke about relocating the practice’s model shop here. A large lightbox to one wall is particularly intriguing, an insight into the work of maintaining an archive.
Libraries and archives are timeless in their way; they are in it for the long haul, and call for a certain lasting solidity of presence. The castle-like Lambeth Palace Library certainly meets this expectation, albeit in effect it is slightly compromised by the choice of aluminium around the windows (not sure that it works visually with the brick).
It is certainly neatly constructed and durable. It is protective, perhaps overly defensive, of its valuable collections sequestered in concrete tombs within, and it certainly can’t be denied that money and time has been spent carefully here. It will yet take some time for both the brick and the surrounding planting to bed in, and I look forward to returning once that has happened.
The building has taken a holistic approach to sustainability and this will help the client to achieve the targeted BREEAM Excellent rating. As part of our fabric-first approach the building is highly insulated, which is very beneficial to the collection, the protection of which requires stable environmental control.
Peer review was an essential part of the design’s development towards a heavily scrutinised low-energy conditioning and protection strategy. The roofs of the two wings contain PV arrays which contribute to electricity provision. Building on a greenfield site, a driver for sustainable development was the careful consideration of rainwater and run-off; this was fundamental to the design of an ecology pond that the building embraces; all of the rainwater makes its way to this point.
Working closely with Dan Pearson Studio, the garden was designed in empathy with the existing garden. Extensive areas of new habitat are formed that will encourage new wildlife and species to visit. During construction a translocation pond was formed on site, as the new pond was the optimum location for the tower crane; the species from an existing smaller pond on site were transferred there, then moved back to their new home.
The views out to the wildlife habitat from the entrance hall were an enjoyable part of the community engagement discussions, where visitors to the open events included families from the Evelina Children’s Hospital, for whom a tranquil space, off the busy street, will offer some respite and relaxation. Stephen Smith, partner, Wright & Wright Architects
The challenge facing Lambeth Palace Library was that, for historic reasons, the collections were spread over multiple stores in two sites, which made meeting the stringent archival standards for environmental and fire protection more and more difficult to achieve. The Church Commissioners determined to address this challenge, creating a single national library and archive protecting the collections by exceeding current standards and best practice in a low-carbon and sustainable manner.
Given that the primary focus was protecting the collections, all of which are now in archival-standard storage with fire suppression, the brief insisted on largely passive environmental control from a team designing with whole-life performance in mind. This has been achieved through the dense structure, which minimises fire risk and energy inputs, with almost half our energy needs now supplied by rooftop solar panels.
The nature of the building also means that we have, through the work of Wright & Wright and Dan Pearson Studio, created a quiet, ecologically rich enclave at the end of the grounds of Lambeth Palace in what is a noisy urban environment; all designed so that it only uses 3 per cent of the site footprint. The building itself successfully resolves the challenge of protecting our collections and, with its accessible entrance hall, gallery, and reading and seminar rooms, provides greater opportunities than ever before to reach out to as wide an audience as possible, enabling the collections to be used and accessed more than they have ever been in their more than 400-year history. Declan Kelly, director, libraries and archives, Lambeth Palace Library
An archive building on this scale in central London brings engineering challenges happily absent from more common building types. Regarding the structure, these related to the ground conditions and archaeology; the archive racking requirements in relation to loading, deflection and fire resistance; and the careful consideration of construction type, material specification, sequence and detail to aid the creation of passively controlled conditions.
The historical significance of the site called for several archaeological digs and a requirement to minimise the impact of the foundations on subsurface deposits. Intense bombing of the palace and its surroundings in the Second World War also meant there was a very high risk of uncovering unexploded ordnance. These constraints combined to suggest the adoption of smaller numbers of long, high-load piles, whose performance was justified in an enabling work contract with on-site pile load testing, alongside a magnetometer survey. Compliance with the relevant archive standards required floor loadings of 15kN/m2 – 10 times what is needed in residential developments – and equivalent to a swimming pool on every floor level. Even under these loads, the structure is required to maintain within billiard table standards of level. Four-hour fire resistance is also stipulated.
These requirements, alongside the need for very high airtightness for the passive performance, suggested a main structure in reinforced concrete. While our assessment of the resulting structural embodied carbon at around 500kgCO 2 e/m2 makes us blush in comparison with many current projects and targets nearer 200 or 150, the result is a building which should have the durability to house this invaluable collection indefinitely, with minimal operational carbon costs.
The budget is not lavish, and the archive spaces are rightly hardworking, honest, warehouse-like volumes. While a higher level of detail and quality of finish has been reserved for the more public spaces, and for the garden that they all enjoy, even the landscape is working, as the pond doubles as the attenuation tank to limit surface water run-off from the site. Andy Toohey, partner, Price & Myers
This unique building serves two primary functions. Firstly, Max Fordham wanted to work with the client and team to provide a modern and inspiring building for users to work and study in. Good views, daylight, acoustics and fresh air were all key to this.
Secondly, there was a clear need to provide a robust solution for the long-term preservation of the archive and library – a stable and ideal environment in which to house the collections.
Whilst this type of brief can lead to expensive, complex and energy-intensive air conditioning solutions, we knew the client wanted a low-carbon building, so using the building structure and fabric as a climate modifier seemed the obvious way to go.
A decision was made early on to opt for an all-electric building with no fossil fuel heating. We recommended that the client add a conservation physicist to the team, someone who could provide specialist advice and challenge our ideas with their experience. The archive strongrooms evolved into a hybrid design whereby they were let to admit seasonal fluctuations of temperature and humidity within an extended range, while plant provided adjustments, as well as air circulation, if and when required. This also allowed a simple environmental control system to be implemented.
We produced an energy and carbon operational target and risk schedule both to demonstrate to the client what was to be achieved and how, and to allow monitoring of the development of the design throughout the procurement, installation and operational phases of the project. This will help the client achieve the targeted BREEAM rating of Excellent. Lidia Guerra, engineer, Max Fordham
The section detail is taken through the main entrance, with a focus on the projecting window at the first floor gallery. The frameless glazing at first floor sits above a steel channel that holds the building signage, formed in brass letters. The hand-made red brick skin of the elevation wraps into the entrance hall to form continuity of the external materials through into this internal space of arrival and orientation. The joints of the brickwork change from bucket-handle to raked in the entrance hall as part of the acoustic design.
Passing through the two sets of high-security glazed doors at ground floor a double-height space opens up, with views to the ecology pond. The gallery at first floor has a balustrade formed in metal fins with an oak handrail; this sits on a steel channel bolted back to the concrete frame, which is deliberately set at the same datum at the channel on external elevation to tie the two details together visually.
The building is an in-situ concrete frame that provides four hours of fire protection to the Special Collection above this space. To span the entrance hall the concrete slab is 1.5m thick, forming a cruciform shape, a cross that symbolically supports the Collection above. The entrance hall is naturally ventilated and has underfloor heating beneath the yorkstone on the ground floor and the oak boards at first floor level. Stephen Smith, partner, Wright & Wright Architects
Start on site April 2018 Completion August 2020 Gross internal floor area 5,400m² Construction cost £23.5 million Client Church Commissioners for England Executive architect Wright& Wright Architects Landscape architect Dan Pearson Studio Structural engineer Price & Myers M&E engineer Max Fordham Cost consultant Fanshawe Project manager Stuart A Johnson Consulting CDM consultant Stroma Main contractor Knight Harwood Acoustic and BREEAM consultant Max Fordham Fire safety consultant Menzies Partners Planning consultant DP9 Façade engineer Thornton Tomasetti
On-site energy generation 24.6% Heating and hot water load 11.01 kWh/m²/yr Total energy load 38.7 kWh/m²/yr (regulated) Total carbon emissions 6.55 kgCO2/m² Airtightness at 50Pa 2.55 m³/hr/m² (measured) Overall area-weighted U-value 0.22 W/m²K
Tags Lambeth Lambeth Palace Library Wright and wright
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