Expanded View: The New Wing of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center by Julie Decker

The Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, which opened in 1968 - the one-hundredth anniversary of the United State's purchase of Alaska from Russia - is the result of a public-private partnership between the municipality of Anchorage, private donors, and a local historical society. Inaugurated with a modest first exhibition of 60 borrowed paintings from private collectors and 2,500 historic and ethnographic objects loaned from the Cook Inlet Historical Society, the Anchorage Museum has now become one of the most celebrated attractions in Alaska.

The critically acclaimed architect David Chipperfield, with the participation of Anchorage-based architects Kumin Associates, designed the ambitions eighty-thousand-square-foot expansion of the Anchorage Museum, completed in 2009, to accommodate the growing needs of the museum and to reflect its increasingly international reputation. Following the thoughtful, minimalist vocabulary of his previous works but responding resoundingly to the climate, geographical, and material conditions of Alaska, Chipperfield's new wing expresses the future of the museum and offers insight into Alaska and the North.

Expanded View: The New Wing of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center chronicles the museum's remarkable history and commemorates the opening of the new wing. The book includes concept drawings, floor plans, and sections, as well as photographs of the construction and finished work, and opens with an introduction by James Pepper Henry, the director of the Anchorage Museum.