Winnipeg Modern: Architecture, 1945–1975 (review)

The first, and therefore welcome, book about mid-century modernism in Winnipeg begins on a surprisingly unwelcoming note. ‘Sour’ summarizes the first essay, by social historian David Burley, who describes a city that could get nothing right. According to Burley, there was no opportunity to revive a city centre frayed by three decades of war, economic bust, and labour strife that Winnipeg couldn’t flub; no challenge in the way of public housing it could successfully rise to; no megaproject it would refuse to entertain, even one requiring the storied crossroads of Portage and Main to be sacrificed to an underground shopping concourse. (The corner was erased, the concourse never built.) Every wrong that befell Winnipeg after 1945 is laid at the door of high-handed modern planning.

Mercifully the following seven essays are more upbeat, although the book’s graphic design in shades of grey might suggest otherwise. A vivid exception is photographer Martin Tessler’s documentation of surviving modernist structures, some still in their original state, others renovated or under renovation. The range of architectural expression, from the calm Miesian order of Winnipeg International Airport to the Japanese-inspired wood detailing of Rae and Jerry’s Steak House and the jaunty little Bridge Drive-in where you can still grab a sundae, shows modernism at mid-century to have been anything but monotonous, anonymous, or dull.

Nor was it resistant to history or place-making, as art historian Serena Keshavjee, the editor of Winnipeg Modern, argues in her essay on Centennial Hall at the University of Winnipeg, a downtown campus. The building was the brainchild of a young local architect named Lewis Morse, who sold the firm charged with the university’s expansion on a ‘groundscraper’ – a low, transparent, glass and steel structure to be erected over and around two existing buildings, thus creating a variety of in-between and up-above spaces that could be programmed and reprogrammed as needed. Keshavjee calls it a ‘mini-city in the core of a bigger city’ – complete with streets, courtyards, and super-graphic arrows guiding circulation – and claims it anticipated Centre Georges Pompidou, which speaks the same hi-tech language in the name of accessibility and democratization. Centennial Hall opened to international fanfare in 1972. By that decade’s end, Keshavjee laments, it had been so shamefully neglected and altered that, instead of revitalizing the downtown as intended, it had become its shabby likeness.

One valuable service performed by Winnipeg Modern is the attribution of buildings to their designers, such as Morse, who had previously gone nameless. Kelly Crossman, in a particularly thoughtful essay, singles out James Donahue and David Thordarson. Donahue was the independent Harvard-educated architect and professor who, on behalf of one of the five firms that got all the big jobs in town, designed the Monarch Life Building and the University of Manitoba architecture school, as well as two houses, modest but influential. Thordarson, who worked for Green, Blankstein, Russell, especially admired the creamy Manitoba limestone mined in Tyndall, a traditional material, which he put to strikingly to use in the Elizabeth Dafoe Library, the Norquay Building, and St George’s Anglican Church.

Thordarson and Bernard Brown, who had Mies on his mind, were co-designers of Winnipeg International Airport, a landmark of such sophistication it figures large in two articles. Herbert Enns, in a far-ranging piece about the meeting of modernism and the prairies – the former valued light, space, and openness, the latter had them to spare – sees the airport, with its floating mezzanine and ‘luminous, artificial-sky ceiling,’ as the poetic embodiment of the surrounding prairie landscape; while Bernard Flaman addresses the federally funded public art, inspired by the prairies and commissioned from some of Canada’s leading abstract painters and sculptors, that enhanced the airport’s now greatly diminished allure.

Two essays devoted, one apiece, to Gustavo da Roza and Etienne Gaboury, round out Winnipeg Modern. Mention must also be made of the many mentions of John Russell, the exemplary...