At the Pas-de-Calais archives, the photos and videos speak for themselves: the construction site for the new building is starting to seriously take shape! New images were released in May 2024, giving us a glimpse of the next reading room whose walls are already standing. A few more months of patience and the two Pas-de-Calais archive centers will finally be reunited!
Saturated for several years, these two buildings, located one in Arras, the other in Dainville and approximately 2.5 km apart from each other, will soon become one, on one and the same site, that of Dainville, not far from the previous one at 5 and 7 rue du March 19, 1962. The project even goes so far as to bring together the Archives, the House of Archeology and the Departmental Media Library into a single cultural center.
The new building will therefore allow the Archives to properly respond to their missions, in particular that of welcoming the public. with a centralized reading room, scalable and adapted to current attendance and uses, an exhibition hall and an auditorium with around 120 seats and three rooms dedicated to welcoming groups, particularly school groups.
And of course, for the collection of archives, the new volumes will extend the capacity and will allow 4.5 levels to ensure the collection and processing of funds. These new spaces will be adapted to archive processing processes with reception room, sorting rooms, quarantine room, disinfection room and emergency room. They will make it possible to gradually eliminate the backlog of payments which is estimated at 3 linear km of archives. currently on hold with the producing services due to the saturation of the current premises. The storage capacity will thus be increased to 62 linear km.
The promise of an efficient building certified as HQE Sustainable Building reassures all those who are worried about the future: energy consumption will be offset by electricity production with photovoltaic panels on the terrace. All this has a cost: €33.1 million, of which €5 million is subsidized by the Ministry of Culture. A project to follow while waiting for the moving of the archives scheduled for 2025.
