The Royal Alberta Museum is the largest museum in Western Canada. It originally opened in 1967 and was called, at the time, the Provincial Museum of Alberta. In 2011, construction of a completely new museum was announced and started in 2014. The museum was finished two years later in 2016. For the next two years, the 2.4 million objects from the original museum were moved to the Royal Alberta Museum. To house these objects, Indiana limestone, which was quarried by Indiana Limestone Co. that is owned by North American stone producer Polycor, was selected. The architectural firm was Dialog, part of a design team with Ledcor and Lundholm Associates.
“The goal was to create an identifiable focal point in the downtown Edmonton Arts District by building a new museum to replace the older one that was constructed in 1967,” said Steve Schrenk, digital media director and design consultant for Polycor. “New exhibition spaces were incorporated into the design and the result has doubled the museum’s floor space, compared to the existing building. The site is where two of the province’s main survey grids converge — the British system, where the streets align with north, south, east and west, and the French system, with the streets running parallel to the nearby North Saskatchewan River. This convergence is reflected in the layout of the museum; the main galleries were designed to align with the French grid and the feature gallery aligns with the British grid.”