Anchorage Museum

It’s an ocean, a continent, and a far cry from Berlin to Anchorage, Alaska, but London-based David Chipperfield Architects was working on the renovation of Friedrich August Stüler’s Neues Museum and the expansion of the Anchorage Museum at about the same time. If the architects were responding to the grandeur of history in urbanistically dense, culturally loaded Berlin, they responded to a different form of grandeur in Anchorage—the Cugach Mountains—and to another urbanism: a sprawling frontier city with wood-frame houses sprinkled among commercial mid-rises.

The commission called for a nearly 90,000-square-foot expansion to the existing museum, a composite building with a single-story original volume transformed by a 1984 Mitchell Giurgola Architects addition.

This new expansion had to accommodate galleries and the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center.