National Archives in Kraków, Nowy Sącz Branch

Preparations for the construction of a new building of the Nowy Sącz branch of the National Archives in Kraków originally began in 2018. With the help of the local government, the State Treasury granted the Archives a new plot for the construction of the new building, located at 12 29 Listopada Street in Nowy Sącz. The project is financed using public funds granted by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.

The estimated total cost of the construction work is 31 million zlotys. The planned completion date is 31/12/2023.

The building will consist of an office part and a storage facility. The storage facility will be a passive building, which means that it will require minimal amounts of energy to maintain stable environmental conditions (thermos effect). The building will be highly environmentally friendly. This is primarily because it will be independent from the district heating system thanks to a geothermal heat pump connected to a network of 100-meter-deep trenches located on the plot. Some of the electrical energy required will be 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.

Due to the shape of the plot, the Nowy Sącz building will be an elongated cuboid, with its longer side facing the public road. It will be a two-story building with a glazed, street-facing office part at the bottom, and a windowless storage area at the back of the plot.

The public area will feature a conference room, a reading room, exhibition areas, classrooms, records processing rooms and a digitization workshop. The new building will host cultural events organized for the local community.

With mobile racks installed, the storage facility will be able to store some 9500 meters of records. It will store all archival materials created in the Nowy Sącz and Podhale area. In order to protect them from various accidents, the storage area will be equipped with a state-of-the-art automatic water mist fire protection system.

The building will offer a total of 2538.70 m² of floor space, and its volume will be 15,735.08 m³.

Within a single generation, the Nowy Sącz building and the already finished Kraków building will solve the problem of insufficient paper material storage space that has been plaguing Lesser Poland.