Campus Architecture
The Packard Campus was designed to be a green building, being situated mostly underground and topped with sod roofs. It was designed to have minimal visual impact on the Virginia countryside by blending into the existing landscape. From the northwest, only a semi-circular terraced arcade appears in the hill to allow natural light into the administrative and work areas. Additionally, the site also included the largest private sector re-forestation effort on the Eastern Seaboard, amassing over 9,000 tree saplings and nearly 200,000 other plantings.
The underground vaults (some set to temperatures below freezing) contain nearly 90 miles (140 km) of shelving, not including 124 nitrate film vaults: the largest nitrate film storage complex in the Western hemisphere. The campus's data center is the first archive to preserve digital content at the petabyte (1 million gigabyte) level.
Of special interest is the 206-seat theater capable of projecting both film and modern digital cinema and which features a digital organ rising from under the stage to accompany silent film screenings. The Packard Campus currently holds semi-weekly screenings of films of cultural significance in its reproduction Art Deco theater according to this schedule.
Read more about this topic: National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)