Short abstract:

Long-term storage infrastructures are often the subject of an architectural treatment that must ensure the conservation of the entities stored and deal with compound risks in the new climatic regime. How does this search for balance transform architects' practices and affect the building itself?

Long abstract:

This proposal, which is linked to a broader research program on long-term storage infrastructures (LESLIE), explores architectural and urban planning practices in the context of long-term storage infrastructures such as museum reserves, data centers, CO2 storage, radioactive waste burial and seed banks. These infrastructures deal with a temporal paradox: they are designed to store tangible and intangible entities over the long term, in a multi-century perspective, but simultaneously face changing environments (melting permafrost, flooding, etc.). We argue that they could be considered as places of experimentation for architecture and construction, as it is necessary to conceive new materials, new conservation systems and a different architectural treatment, requiring external and internal innovation. Indeed, infrastructures are destabilized by compound risks, sometimes quicker than their architects anticipated: water infiltration, moisture or even building decay.

We will draw on several case studies in the field of seed banks (such as the Millennium Seed Bank (Kew Gardens), Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Norway), the Juliet Rice Wichman Botanical Research Center in Hawaii), museum reserves (the Louvre conservation center in Liévin (France), the Mucem resource conservation center (Marseille, France), or CO2 capture (as in Hellisheidi, Iceland). Based on interviews with engineering and design offices, technicians and users who are responsible for maintenance, we will explore the practices that enable us to identify the new uncertainties facing these infrastructures, and the solutions they have found or are in the process of finding.