ArchitectureWeek - Design - Chipperfield's Anchorage Museum

Page D1.1 . 20 July 2011

Chipperfield's Anchorage Museum
Photo Essay

by Kevin Matthews

Photo: Kevin Matthews / Artifice Images

In downtown Anchorage, a little farther off the beaten path than his museums and galleries in London and Berlin, David Chipperfield has constructed another architectural gem, exhibiting his signature clear modernism that manages to be at once bold and quiet.

The scheme turns the museum around, visually, as Chipperfield's Anchorage Museum addition creates an entirely new and gorgeous face and image for the museum, and functionally, as the main facade and entry are shifted from the south side — where the old versions enfronted a hum-drum street — to the west — where the bright new presence faces on a landscaped urban square, toward the core of downtown and the water beyond, while taking the ever-present Alaskan mountains behind the city as the building's own sweeping backdrop.

The elegant skinning of custom glass, striped with mirroring and layered both for thermal performance and to modulate transparency for interior spaces, at times has the building reflecting its surroundings, and at times disappearing with a shimmer against the sky.

It's a block of ice, a mountain glacier, a pinstripe suit, a scrim, a mirage and optical illusion, a candy store for the brain, a magic box. Truly, a gift to the city.

Inside, bold blocks of color mixed with simple natural wood and dyed smooth concrete are deployed with sublimely clean detailing, so the walls, ceilings, grand atrium stair, and ultimately the museum exhibition spaces, all coordinate and move the visitor with grace and drama that are strangely transparent in their directness — while always stretching to bask in natural light that filters in.

Through this artifice, daylight seems to fill much of the building, while its living force is held safely away from thousands of remarkably special objects. >>>