The New Swiss Federal Archives in Zollikofen

Based on the competition to design a new building for the Swiss Federal Archives, announced in February 2024 by the Swiss Federal Office for Buildings and Logistics, the typological preconceptions of the archives and in particular their working areas are being called into question. The current location in Bern‘s city center offers no opportunity to add further space to the historicist building, contrary to the high utilization rate. As a result, a new building site was chosen in the nearby suburb of Zollikofen, whose industrial area east of the railroad line is undergoing major changes. In a conglomerate of recently built and soon-to-be-built state institutions, the new location of the Federal Archives is one of the last building blocks to fit into the overall picture. Time itself stands in contrast between long-term storage and daily operation, visualized in opacity and transparency, sensitive to the different needs of paper and humans.