Sense of history: this medieval palace has been imaginatively renovated to house a regional archive.

The wonderfully imperious sounding Palace of the Kings of Navarra in Pamplona dates from the twelfth century. Looming haughtily over the town from an elevated plateau, its medieval bulk is a prominent fixture in the urban skyline. The reuse and adaptation of such ancient structures can often be problematic, but since falling derelict in the late twentieth century, this particular relic has been successfully renovated and revitalized by Rafael Moneo to house a new regional archive and study centre. As might be expected, the new work exudes the crafted elegance that has become Moneo's signature, but here it is given a tougher edge through creative juxtaposition and engagement with historic structures and materials.

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Moneo has strong connections with Navarra (he was born in Tudela, south of Pamplona), and in many ways his architecture has an affinity with the minimal, muscular character of medieval structures. He frequently employs alcazar-like forms--tall, neutral containers, often toplit, with massive walls. His approach to Pamplona's palace has been one of both reduction and addition, stripping away distracting accretions from the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and adding a new set of contemporary interventions around the medieval core, so the complex is now a finely judged synthesis of very old and very new. Clad in mottled grey and gold local limestone cut from the quarries that supplied the original palace, Moneo's strong, cubic volumes share a formal and material kinship with the original medieval buildings, but are clearly distinguishable as being of their time.

New and old parts wrap around a central cloistered courtyard, with the remains of the palace on the north and west sides now transformed into an academic research centre, with reading rooms, lecture hall, administration and workshops. These connect with Moneo's new tower for archive storage on the south and east side. Archives are housed in a trio of blocks linked by a quadrangular ramp around a central void, an arrangement that eases the movement of research materials around the building as they can simply be trundled around the ramps. The cloister in the main central courtyard is now enclosed by a glass skin which, in its lightness and transparency, contrasts with the hermetic impermeable outer walls that are a massive, brooding presence in Pamplona's townscape.

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The building has many different sorts of interior realm, from the theatrically gloomy stone-vaulted hall in the north wing which now houses an exhibition space for historic manuscripts, to the more airy volumes of the reading room and library, with their warm timber walls and shelves. Timber is used extensively throughout the interior, to great effect. American cherry is employed in the wall panels and furniture, its rich red tones set against pale European maple flooring. Reclaimed oak is used for the cloister doors and new oak for the cloister windows. Moneo's elegant custom-designed shelving (all 45 000 linear metres of it) is made from American black cherry, which was specified to encompass natural features and colour variations. Detailing is refined, but not to the point of fashionable reductivism, and there is an obvious sensitivity about how things are made and put together. Fittingly, for a building dedicated to the care and conservation of historic archives, the past informs the present, but in Moneo's hands, it is a fertile reciprocity.

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