Tengbom Builds a Red-Clad Archive with a Timber Atrium for the National Archives of Sweden in Härnösand

Riksarkivet, the National Archives of Sweden, is one of the country's oldest government agencies. Its job is to hold the paper memory of the state, and in 2025 it gained a 35,000 m² facility in Härnösand, on the northern coast. Designed by Tengbom under lead architect Pontus Eriksson, built by PEAB for the state property company Specialfastigheter, the building has to do two jobs that rarely sit comfortably together. It must be a sealed, climate-stable machine for documents, and it must also work as a public institution and a daily workplace.

What interests us is how plainly Tengbom separates those two jobs and then lets them meet. From the road you see a long, red-panelled block with ribbon windows, set back in deep snow and closer in spirit to a warehouse than a civic monument. Inside, the archive halls run on a strict column grid, while a timber atrium of glulam frames, slatted balustrades and stacked stair landings becomes the social heart of the building. The vault stays a vault. The people get the wood and the daylight.

A Red Block in a White Landscape

The exterior is disciplined to the point of austerity. Four storeys of red cladding, horizontal window bands and a long, flat roofline read clearly against overcast winter skies and plowed snowbanks. The red cannot help but recall the falu-red barns and farm buildings of the Swedish countryside, and that association does useful work: it makes a very large, mostly closed volume feel familiar rather than forbidding.

The blank stretches matter as much as the windows. One elevation is almost entirely solid, broken only by a vertical vent strip and a small service door, with a lone pedestrian crossing the snow for scale. This is the archive side announcing itself honestly. Instead of disguising the closed rooms with fake glazing, Tengbom accepts the blank wall and gives the entrance, with its canopy, lettering and glazed double doors, the job of signalling the public way in.

The Timber Atrium as Civic Room

The atrium is the project's strongest move. Glulam columns and beams, a diagonal brace, slatted balconies and a run of stacked stair landings rise through the building under globe pendant lights. Looking up, you read the structure directly: cross beams, bracing and balustrades layered toward the grey ceiling. Nothing is boxed in, and the timber does the expressive work that a lesser building would hand to applied finishes.

The red returns inside, on walls that line the atrium, so the facade colour is carried into the core rather than left as skin. One detail sums up the whole building: a grey archive door set into that red wall, opening off the warm timber space. It marks the threshold between the people's building and the documents' building, and Tengbom makes it visible instead of hiding it down a back corridor.

Arrival and the Ground Floor Hall

The entrance hall combines security and welcome without much fuss. Turnstile gates and white floor lines handle control, while a carved timber feature wall and round pendant lights soften the sequence. Further in, a long timber table with an arched base stands among glulam columns, beside lift doors and under a mesh ceiling. That table is a quiet but telling gesture: a piece of furniture scaled for gathering, placed where many institutions would put an empty lobby.

The mix of exposed services above and crafted timber at hand height recurs throughout. It is a pragmatic hierarchy. Money and care go to what you touch and see up close, and the technical layer stays honest and accessible overhead.

Reading and Working with the Landscape

The reading hall is tall and calm: white desks, globe pendants, shelving along a red wall, with winter daylight coming through stacked windows. For a building whose primary residents are documents that must be kept out of the light, it is a generous gesture to give the researchers a room this bright and this high.

The offices go further. Height-adjustable desks face corner windows that look out onto a snowy, forested valley and a frozen lake, and individual workstations sit against slatted timber walls with views to snow-covered pines. The ribbon windows that look so regular from outside turn out to be carefully aimed. Staff who spend their days with archival material get the Norrland landscape as their counterweight.

Below Ground: The Archive Itself

The basement archive corridor shows the building's real purpose without any decoration. Exposed ductwork, linear ceiling lights, white columns, floor rails and mesh-fronted mobile shelving make up a pure working environment. Rails let the shelving units move, so storage can be packed densely and opened only where an aisle is needed. This is where most of the 35,000 m² earns its keep.

We like that Tengbom doesn't try to make this space into something it isn't. The contrast with the atrium upstairs is the point. The two halves of the building are designed for different occupants, and each is allowed to look like what it is.

Further Views of the Building

Taken together, the photographs show a consistent palette held across a very large building: red cladding, exposed glulam, white surfaces and visible services, set against the white and grey of a northern winter. Consistency at this scale is harder than it looks. A 35,000 m² program could easily break into a pile of unrelated parts, and the restricted material language is what keeps this one reading as a single institution.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan makes the logic legible right away. Two large column-gridded archive halls sit beneath a strip of offices, divided by a central core. The exploded axonometric reinforces it, stacking the floor plates and marking public, administration and delivery zones in red, all linked by a single vertical core. Program sorting this clear tends to produce buildings that are easy to run and easy to extend.

The section shows a five-storey block with stepped terraces on one side, which softens the mass where it meets the ground. The elevations confirm the banded windows along the long red facade, framed by spruce. The wall section, with its layered concrete and insulation beside a stone-edged slope, points to the thermal mass and envelope performance that an archive in a cold climate depends on.

Why This Project Matters

Archive buildings tend to fail in one of two ways. Either they become impenetrable bunkers that treat the public as an afterthought, or they spend their energy on a showy front that has nothing to do with the storage behind it. Tengbom avoids both by being explicit about the split. The vault is engineered as a vault, and the human spaces get the timber, the light and the views, with a visible threshold between them.

Siting a national institution in Härnösand rather than the capital also carries weight, and the architecture responds with regional restraint instead of metropolitan spectacle. The red cladding, the glulam atrium and the windows aimed at forest and frozen lake place the state's memory inside a recognisably northern Swedish building. For anyone designing large, technically demanding public facilities, it shows that warmth and rigour can share one envelope.

National Archives of Sweden (Riksarkivet) by Tengbom, lead architect Pontus Eriksson. Location: Härnösand, Sweden. Area: 35,000 m². Year: 2025. Client: Specialfastigheter. General contractor: PEAB. Photography: Felix Gerlach.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.