Built within the new capital of British India, the Imperial Record Office: now the National Archives of India is considered an important representative example of culmination of imperial architecture. An integral part of a city of the Empire that continues to this day as democratic India’s capital, the building’s design and construction raises questions on the nature of architecture in one of the most significant British capital city building projects in the subcontinent. In pre-existent scholarship, the architecture and urban environment of Imperial Delhi has predominantly been accepted as a product of the past, as a ‘garden city’ with neoclassical expression. The proposed paper would share the process of generating new knowledge about this structure, carried out through documentation and investigations of the materials, fabric and construction along with the analyses of space planning and design. This brings forth unique aspects that testify the actual development of architectural modernity. Planned within a historic city in the early decades of the twentieth century, possessing both an airport (modern) and cantonment (typical of the pre-modern), these findings about the Imperial Record Office are exemplary to represent a paradox in Imperial Delhi’s built environment. The paper aims to demonstrate, through this case, how this building’s architecture was simultaneously a product of the past and an envisaged future. It shows how the structure’s attributes embody the complex process of an emerging modernity, dressed in a façade of architectural classicism.