History Lesson
Arizona Archive Preserves the Past to Protect the Future

By Scott Blair

The $32.3 million Polly Rosenbaum Archives in Phoenix will preserve Arizona's important documents. The 125,000-sq-ft space will also treat and restore these materials through a variety of unique rooms, including a document blast-freezer and a fumigation room.

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Irreplaceable records of Arizona's history are being destroyed every day because of a lack of space to properly house them.

That's the alarming message state archivists delivered to the Arizona State Legislature more than 10 years ago. After years of false starts, state lawmakers finally approved $32.5 million for the construction of the Polly Rosenbaum Archives and History Building, and construction began in January.

"It's important for people to understand this building is not great-great-aunt Sally's diary of crossing the plains," says GladysAnn Wells, director of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records. "As much as I might be interested in reading that, these records are what protect personal entitlements, property and water rights."

The building is located on a vacant lot near the State Capitol on 19th Avenue and Madison Street, and is named for Arizona's longest serving state representative and a long-time advocate for historic preservation.


"Almost all of the property on the project's block was already owned by the state," says Mike Braun, executive director for the Arizona Legislative Council, a statutory committee of the state Legislature. "It is immediately south of the current records retention center, which would be a compatible operation."

Phoenix-based DWL Architects had been retained in 2000 to begin design work on the building, but after Sept. 11, the project was put on hold.

"We actually had to go back two years later and be selected again to do the same job, although the scope and budget had grown dramatically," says Dwight Todd, executive vice president with DWL. "The desire was to keep it fairly simple. We knew we didn't have a lot of money to spend on the job on a cost-per-square-foot basis given all the special systems."

While just two stories high, the heavy load requirements of the building's contents meant that the building requires a substantial foundation of 89, 5- to 8-ft piers at a depth of 18 ft.

"Most of the floors are 500-lb loading per square foot, which is huge," says Kelly Davis, senior project manager with the project's construction manager at-risk, M.A. Mortenson Co., a Minneaopolis-based firm that recently expanded to Phoenix. Documents will be stored in massive shelving units mounted on rails embedded within the concrete floors.

"We used an older style of construction, which was more common in the industrial, mercantile days: concrete columns, concrete column capitals, drop panels and a heavily reinforced two-way concrete floor system," says James A. Lane, PE., principal with the Phoenix office of structural engineer KPFF Consulting Engineers. "This building is built to last 100 years."

Concrete was also chosen for its inherent fire-protection properties. "The only thing we know we couldn't protect against is a Sept. 11-type attack into the building," Wells says.

To prevent water intrusion, a standing-seam metal roof tops a sloping cast-in-place concrete slab, ranging in thickness from 10 to 14 in. "Pouring concrete on large shoring tables at an angle is not easy," Davis says. "You have to plan your pours out very carefully and in such a manner as to do everything safely and stay within the loads of your design."

Insulated precast concrete panels comprise the exterior walls. Each 10-ft-wide by 32-ft-high sandwich panel contains a 3-in. layer of architectural concrete, an internal 3-in. layer of insulation and a 6-in. structural concrete layer providing wind sheer and seismic support.

With most of the structure's space devoted to warehousing documents, the only public areas are a meeting space on the first floor and a reading room on the second level.

In order to best protect the primarily paper-based material, the storage area will be kept at 55 degrees, plus or minus 2 degrees, and 25% humidity, plus or minus 5%, at all times.

"The humidity control is more difficult," Todd says. "As hard as it is to believe here in the desert, we actually will have to dehumidify the space every once in a while."

The air will be superfiltered, where all but 10% of the air is recirculated in order to maintain the environment. "There really aren't that many humans in this building, so we don't need to introduce a lot of fresh air into the system," Todd says.

Davis adds: "The key is to get it built in time and in such a manner that it is completely enclosed and pumping conditioned air into the space for 30 days to get it stabilized and acclimated to those conditions before the materials are brought in. When you first turn everything on, you are going to get ups and downs."

Phoenix-based Tri-City Mechanical was the mechanical contractor on the project.

In addition to storage, the building serves a long-overdue need to repair and preserve the records, Wells says.

"There is currently no place in the Southwest, let alone in Arizona, to do the treatment and preservation of records that are damaged by insect infestation, fire or water," she says. "There are just a few commercial facilities to do this kind of work and they are extremely expensive."

Treatment rooms include a cold room, a blast freezer, fumigation room and a conservation lab with flume hoods. The blast freezer is a packaged unit where the supplier essentially delivers a free-standing room, Davis says.

Many state documents have had to be destroyed due to insect and rodent infestations so severe that handling the papers would have posed too great a health risk. "Now we'll be able to take infested or suspect records and not risk handling them until the documents have been treated or blast-frozen," Wells says.

The building's various systems were chosen after extensive research. "We've either visited, spoke at length with or reviewed construction documents for every single building of this type that has been built in this country over the last 15 years," Wells says. "A lot of due diligence went into this very complicated building."

Wells says she is looking forward to the restoration and cataloguing work to come when the facility opens in June. "We are coming up on our state centennial (in 2012) and to have this building fully functional and in service for people who want to do research is so wonderful," she adds.

Key Players

Owner: State of Arizona Legislative Council
Construction Manager: Gilbane Building Co.
Architect: DWL Architects + Planners Inc.
CM at Risk: M.A. Mortenson Co.
Engineers: KPFF Consulting Engineers; LSW; Stantec
Electrical: Commonwealth Electric
Mechanical: Tri-City Mechanical
Steel: Powers Steel; Great Western Erectors
Concrete: Mortenson Concrete; Tpac

Useful Sources

To take a virtual fly-through of the building Click Here>>>

To learn more about the archiving of Arizona's historical documents,
visit www.lib.az.us