And with its sweeping, curving horizontal lines and bold, outwardly sloping vertical design strokes, the new addition to the Consortium Library at the University of Alaska Anchorage certainly looks the part.

Besides looking futuristic, the facility promises to advance academic excellence in Alaska. It will provide state-of-the-art electronic library services, Web connections and a center for creating digital content to promote learning opportunities.

Consortium Library Dean Stephen Rollins said the goal is to construct a facility that is not only a depository for books, journals, and documents but also a destination for discovery and a home for historical records.

"We've got this whole electronic library program we're building, and then the building itself as a place for storage of print, places for people to study, study together and talk to the reference librarians," Rollins said.

"Those two things are a very coordinated approach to providing services to not only the campus but to the community. So we're doing both a physical and a virtual library here," he said.

The building now in use is nearly 30 years old and is crammed almost to capacity, does not meet national standards issued by library organizations and has an insufficient amount of study space and technology, Rollins said.

The addition will more than double the size of the current library.

Construction began on the $43.5 million addition in April of last year and has moved along quickly. University officials are planning to occupy the building, squeeze the entire contents of the library into the addition, and set up temporary quarters for the circulation desk by July.

This fall and winter the university will renovate and remodel the existing 85,000 square-foot library, and move many of the collections and other material back in next summer.

The three-story, 109,000 square-foot addition was designed by Rim Architects Inc. of Anchorage and construction is being overseen by Cornerstone General Contractors Inc., also of Anchorage.

Aaron Joseph is the lead architect for the project and said it appears that everyone involved in conceiving, developing and building the addition is "just tickled pink."

And, it's coming in on time and about $4 million under budget, he said.

Rollins said his firm was called in by university officials almost 10 years ago, and told that the new library was a priority and a national college accreditation board had identified the library as a "deficiency they need to upgrade."

UAA Chancellor Lee Gorsuch coined the term "Library of the 21st Century," Joseph said. "So there was that kind of high-tech image that we grabbed pretty early on." He said another main factor driving the architectural vision was a desire expressed by Gorsuch and other university officials to move beyond the utilitarian designs of most of the campus and develop a unique focal point for the institution.

"So that set the tone that maybe we don't want something so rectilinear, maybe not so boxy as the rest of the campus," Joseph said. "And the opportunity for the library, looking to the east at the Chugach Range over there ... made us think of kind of a serpentine, curvilinear wall that students could sit next to and study with that wonderful vista out there."

The main, glass covered walls slant up and out, and while eye-catching, the design has a practical purpose. The southern and eastern walls are exposed to a lot of sun, Joseph said. By tipping the wall down, as the sun comes up, it reduces the direct exposure of the sun on the glass and sunlight is reflected down and away from the building.

"You know when that sun comes up and you are sitting next to the glass, it can get rather uncomfortable," he said. It also allowed us to add some extra square footage on the top floor where we needed it."

Joseph said the biggest challenge he and university officials had was to "very, very quickly," put together a concept, design, program and cost estimate the university could take down to Juneau. He said they did that in a matter of months, and the work paid off.

"It was thought that we wouldn't get full funding from the legislature the first year," he said. "But, lo and behold, they were pretty impressed with what we presented so they gave us the entire package of money and we started into final design which took less than a year."

Joseph said Representative Eldon Mulder, R-Anchorage, was a main sponsor of legislation for the project. The bill made appropriations to the university of $9.5 million in 1998 and the remaining $34 million in 2000.

The project includes construction of a parking garage, completed last year, and an enclosed pedestrian bridge to connect the library to the rest of the UAA campus.

"That's going to be kind of a signature, I think, as we continue to grow on campus ... we'll keep trying to connect these buildings together," Rollins said. "People can park or take the bus and get onto campus, leave their car in one place and then walk up and down the 'spine', to get to class."

The expanded library will serve UAA, Alaska Pacific University, health care providers from throughout the state and the general public through an inter-library loan program. Two organizations, the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services and the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association will relocate to the facility.

Refrigerated vaults are being installed for proper storage of film and video archives, space is available to house unique Alaska historical materials, and a music listening room is included in the renovation.

Rollins said the facility is designed to provide a high level of safety and security for users and staff, and to safeguard the valuable collections in the library.

Once complete, the complex will include what is sure to become an Anchorage landmark.

Plans call for a sixty-foot steel rooftop structure, part tower, part sculpture, to be brightly illuminated at night and during the winter months. Joseph said there are still some details to work out.

"We're working closely with the university to come up with something that represents this 21st Century, distance-learning," he said. "The Chancellor likes to call it a 'beacon of knowledge' ... we're currently working with the FAA to see if we can't illuminate this thing with some laser lighting."

"You're going to able to spot the library from quite a distance around this whole (university and medical) district. And that's the idea, is that people will be able to find the library and using this type of distinctive architecture and having that roof element on there, these are just ways of getting people to know where the library is," Rollins said.

While the new library embraces the new century, a prominent feature hails from the 19th century: a Foucault (pronounced FOO-coh) pendulum will be installed in the center of the main staircase. The device, invented by French physicist Jean Bernard Foucault in 1851, demonstrates the rotation of the earth as it seems to change the direction of its swing during the day. Actually, it is the floor beneath it that is moving.

"The building will rotate 360 degrees, under the pendulum, every twenty-seven hours," Rollins said.

He said, as far as he knows, its the farthest north Foucault device on earth. And because of Anchorage's latitude, we rotate faster than say, San Francisco. It takes forty-four hours there.

"It's an amazing scientific demonstration," Rollins said.