Neil Flanagan: Pilot DC’s sustainability goals and preserve DC’s history by building a new District of Columbia Archives as a net-zero energy building
For nearly a decade, DC officials have promised to construct a purpose-built building for the District’s archives. Despite appropriating millions five years ago, they have not delivered, endangering the irreplaceable physical materials that constitute the most comprehensive resource for DC’s history. Facing new pressure from historians, cultural leaders and 12 advisory neighborhood commissions — not to mention economic challenges in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic — the mayor and the DC Council now have a chance to economically advance the Sustainable DC 2.0 Plan through the new archive facility.
DC needs a new archives building to protect the documents that record the District’s history. According to a 2015 report, about 11% of the District’s records sit in a converted stable on Naylor Court NW; council budget documents show DC pays $600,000 per year for another 35% to sit in a troubled federal repository in Suitland, Maryland; and the remaining 54% are in basements, offices, and costly rental storage. The most valuable and delicate records are at the Naylor Court building, which until recently lacked climate control and still has serious fire protection, security and access deficiencies.
The current opportunity to resolve this long-standing issue while simultaneously advancing DC’s sustainability goals has its roots in two actions taken back in 2018. First, Ward 3 Council member Mary Cheh introduced clean energy legislation, setting renewable energy targets and creating financing systems to meet them.
Later that fall, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration announced at a council hearing that a modern archival facility would start construction in 2019, at the University of the District of Columbia, using $73 million to $80 million already set aside for that purpose. Unfortunately, construction of the new building is still not underway, extending a 25-year period of neglect that continues to damage irreplaceable documents.
More positively during this same period, Bowser signed the Clean Energy DC Omnibus Amendment Act, and her Department of Energy and Environment issued the Sustainable DC 2.0 plan, furthering the District’s commitment to sustainability in the buildings it operates.
That plan specifically sets a goal that all new District-owned buildings should generate more energy than they consume, or “net-zero energy.” It’s an ambitious goal, but one that unexpectedly suits archival facilities. I worked on the first net-zero commercial renovation in the District — the American Geophysical Union’s headquarters in Dupont Circle — and I am positive the new archive facility is a cost-effective way to pilot this goal.
An ideal candidate for high-performance design
Archives have a reputation for being energy hogs. With conventional HVAC systems and ordinary porous buildings, a lot of energy is required to stay within the strict temperature and humidity parameters necessary to keep paper, objects and film from rotting. That typically means big energy bills.
Yet a growing set of projects show that this doesn’t have to be the case. In early February, San Diego County opened a records facility designed to achieve this net-zero energy standard. They minimized energy use, tightened the envelope, and added solar panels.
The designers rethought how to condition the record storage rooms and realized their counterintuitive advantages: They require much less fresh, outside air and lighting because they are only occupied part-time. And since natural light is undesirable, there’s no need for windows and the heat swings that come with them.
In the United Kingdom, at least two archives have been built to the exacting Passive House standard since 2015. Compared to net-zero, Passive House skips on-site energy generation and focuses on minimizing energy use with a highly insulated and airtight building. Design standards for record storage buildings already call for tight control of air and moisture to limit the HVAC costs. So, for a county archive in Herefordshire, the design team realized that Passive House was a natural fit that could save money in the long term.
The architects found that on a specialized building like an archive, upfront costs were about the same. As with many Passive House projects, they could shrink the expensive mechanical systems if they spent more on the envelope of walls, floors and roofs. And by compartmentalizing the sparsely populated record vaults separately from the galleries and workrooms, they were able to build the office elements out of fire-resistant mass timber, reducing the total carbon footprint at construction as well.
That these buildings are smaller than the proposed DC Archives need not be a concern. The Library and Archives Canada, an equivalent of both the National Archives and the Library of Congress, broke ground last year on a much larger sustainable building. Canada’s expansion will store 760,000 cubic feet of records, comfortably more than the 507,000 cubic feet of storage a consultant estimated as necessary for DC’s current and long term needs.
It is feasible and prudent — but still cutting-edge — for the District to build its new archives facility with an eye to the energy requirements of the future. The DC Department of General Services (DGS), the agency responsible for building the new archives facility, won’t do that without a push.
DC has looked backward to sort out the archives
DGS has not taken a forward-looking approach to the archives. Instead it appears to have pursued inappropriate adaptive reuse projects. In the years since the DC Council directed DGS to build from scratch in 2016, there has been little public follow-through.
While the adaptive re-use of existing buildings will be important in reducing the District’s carbon footprint, fitting an exacting use like an archive into an ordinary building would zero out any benefit. According to DGS’ 2016 analysis of its preferred building at the time (the Penn Center in Ward 5’s Eckington neighborhood), fitting the storage into existing floors would have required either nearly doubling the size of the building, or doing a gut renovation with a new concrete structure. Plus, the walls would never be airtight without obliterating the historic features — meaning higher energy costs than a new building, let alone a new net-zero one. The agency’s reasons for pursuing re-use are unknown.
Meanwhile, DGS continues to neglect the existing building in Naylor Court. Though research done in the DC Archives is critical to cultural and policy discussions in the District, it is nonetheless a small government agency with limited influence. Based on the years of delay, it is difficult to see how DGS will deliver a new building for this small government office — administratively part of the Office of the Secretary within the Executive Office of the Mayor — without strong oversight and partnerships with other agencies.
Collaboration between the DC Archives and the DC Department of Energy and Environment to advance a net-zero building may be the most effective way to advance the mission of both organizations — and to end, at long last, the District’s decades-long neglect of its history.
Neil Flanagan is an architectural professional writing a book about the African American Reno community in Tenleytown and the origins of urban planning in the District.
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As you already know, I’m in complete agreement with the request for an updated building for the DC Archives. I had hoped it could go into the main MLK Library, but that obviously isn’t going to happen. Please let me know what I can do to support this.