Thamad Archive

A regional archive needed stable, cool rooms for paper that is centuries old, and a reading room people would want to sit in.

We built one long wall. The documents sit deep inside a rammed-earth mass nearly a metre thick, where temperature and humidity barely move between day and night. Along the wadi side, a reading room looks out through narrow vertical slits cut against the sun, so the light that enters is always indirect by the time it reaches a page.