The new archive store for the Imperial War Musuem at Duxford is to house their historical paper and photographic collection. The building is arranged over two floors with five permanent repositories and a total storage area of around 1200m2. Designed to meet Passivhaus standards, the building is very much a development and improvement of our HARC project.

The building uses ground connection to help stabilise conditions in the stores. In conjunction with high levels of thermal mass and insulation and exemplar air tightness, the strict environmental conditions internally can be controlled by passive means with a simple heat recovery ventilation and low temperature dehumidification system.

E3 carried out extensive environmental modelling, taking into account operational management and future climate change. E3 presented the project at the International Passivhaus Conference in Munich in 2018.

The project follows the long term monitoring of HARC by Elemental, one of our project collaborators, and shows what can be achieved by simple, passive, integrated design, and the building will be economic to run in the long term.