Spitsbergen has a unique visitor center

Few know that Spitsbergen is home to the memory of the world. Responsible for this are two organizations: the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault” with the world’s largest safe storage for plant seeds and the “Arctic World Archive” with a vault that preserves the digital heritage of the world. A new visitor center in Longyearbyen – the capital of Spitsbergen – will present this content to the public for the first time.

The design for “The Arc” comes from the renowned Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta Designs: a glass bridge leads from the entrance building with lobby, ticketing, cloakroom and cafe into the exhibition building, which looks like a robust monolith from the outside. The aim is to give visitors the feeling that they are moving from a familiar environment to a real vault in the permafrost of Spitsbergen. The interior temperature of 4 degrees Celsius and a subdued lighting should reinforce this feeling even further.

In the vertical vault of the exhibition building there is a digital archive containing exhibits of the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault” and the “Arctic World Archive”. They can be experienced through projections on the walls, which are managed using touchscreens and virtual reality technologies. The stored content currently ranges from the art collection of Edvard Munch over 1,500-year-old manuscripts of the Vatican to film clips of the Brazilian footballer Pele.

The aim of “The Arc” is to educate visitors about the value of the unique climatic stability that can be found beyond the Arctic Circle. At the same time, the new visitor center on Spitsbergen is meant to remind us that we must conserve the resources of the world for future generations. It will also develop innovative solutions for the preservation of food and data. The project is still in the planning phase, but should be opened in 2022, given a rapid start of construction.

Click here for the website of Snohetta Designs with the details of the project “The Arc”

Photos: Snohetta & Plomp