The Bureau Palace

Squatting on the horizon of Meltaro's middle district, the Bureau Palace is an ugly building that is home to the five divisions of the Imperial Bureau. It was made to be fit for purpose, rather than as an architectural feature of the city, which means that even though it is made of high quality materials that are intrinsically beautiful in their own right, the building itself has been given the unflattering nickname of ‘the Block House’ by the inhabitants of the Imperial Capital.

Purpose / Function

The purpose of the Bureau Palace is simple, to provide space for the myriad of workers who toil for the five Divisions of the Imperial Bureau  a centralised place to work.

Alterations

Whilst no alterations have been made to the exterior or above ground section of the building, beneath the Block House is a different story. Miles and miles of tunnels and chambers have been excavated deep below the structure, to provide homes for the millions of documents and thousands of objects that the Imperial Annals & Archives Division keep for posterity. Most of these corridors are lined with compartmentalised shelves, each compartment is given a serial number and houses a single document, or single part of a larger collection. It is said that some of the archive structure beneath the building was actually built into pre-existing tunnels, whose ends were sealed off to stop people, or creatures entering the network, though this has never been conclusively proved.
The reason why these alterations were made is simple, the Imperial Annals & Archives Division ran out of space in the part of the building that was allocated to them on the upper floors, and rather than move them out to a separate building, work began to take the Division and its charges underground.

Architecture

As its nickname suggests, the Bureau Place is a large, cuboid building that dominates the middle district of Meltaro. The ground floor is an enormous, marbled entrance hall with a gigantic spiral staircase, capable of accommodating ten people walking abreast that snakes to the upper floors and also down to the network of tunnels that makes up the Imperial Archives.
An upper floor of the building is allocated to the Imperial Treasury, the Defence Bureau, the Bureau of Trade and Commerce and the Imperial Estates, with the fifth floor, which provides panoramic views over the Imperial Capital having been given over to the office complexes of the Heads of each of four Divisions that are allocated above ground space.
As noted above, the Imperial Archives and Annals division, along with the office of its Divisional Head are located below ground.

Founding Date

89AIF

Alternative Names

The Block House

Type

Government complex

Owning Organization

The Imperial Bureau