National Archives in Kraków, Nowy Sącz Branch

On 22 June 2023, we officially opened the new seat of the State Archive in Kraków, Nowy Sącz Branch. 

The architectural form is noteworthy – a massive black block, which correlates with the surrounding area and buildings in a very modern way, elegantly dominating the space.

The Branch in Nowy Sącz of the State Archive in Kraków was established in 1950 as the District Branch in Nowy Sącz of the State Archive in Kraków. The branch was struggling with the location from the very beginning. Both the scale of operations of the institution and its registered office were changing. The Branch moved to the previous address in Nowy Sącz on Jagiellońska Street in 2019. The preparations for building a new seat for the Nowy Sącz Branch, which would allow further, easy development of the unit, began in 2018. Thanks to the cooperation with the local government authorities, the Archive acquired from the State Treasury a new real property at 29 Listopada 12 Street to build on.

The project is financed using public funds granted by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. The total cost of the project, including equipment, is PLN 38,229,172 million. The building was designed by Pracownie Konserwacji Zabytków „Arkona” Sp. z o.o. The substitute investor was ECM Group Polska SA. SKANSKA S.A. performed construction works.

Ecological and accessible building

Due to the shape of the plot, the Nowy Sącz building has a form of an elongated cuboid, with its longer side facing the public road. It is a two-storey building with a glazed, street-facing office part at the bottom, and a windowless storage area at the back of the plot, covering around 2/3 of the whole building.

The building is equipped with a smart building management system (BMS). The repository part is a ‘passive building’, which means that it requires minimal amounts of energy to maintain stable environmental conditions (thermos effect). The building is highly environmentally friendly. This is primarily because it is independent from the district heating system thanks to a ground source heat pump connected to a network of several 100-metre-deep trenches located on the plot. Some of the electrical energy required is supplied by roof-mounted solar panels. This is the second building of this type owned by the State Archives, the first being the Kraków building opened in 2020.

The public area features a conference hall, user space, exhibition hall, rooms for educational activities, rooms for work with records, digitisation lab and a spacious hallway. The new building can host cultural events organised for the local community.

Archival repository of Lesser Poland

The building has a total of 2,538.70 m² of floor space, and its volume is 15,735.08 m³.

The repositories, after installing a mobile shelving system, can accommodate around 9,500 metres of records. It will store all archival materials created in the Nowy Sącz and Podhale area. In order to protect them from various threats, the storage area is equipped with a state-of-the-art automatic water mist fire protection system.

Within a single generation, the Nowy Sącz building and the already finished Kraków building solve the problem of insufficient paper material storage space in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship.