PROJECT Pumphouse, Winnipeg, Manitoba
ARCHITECT 5468796 Architecture
TEXT Trevor Boddy
PHOTOS James Brittain
Medium density housing remains one of the most conservative realms of architectural design. Looking beyond surface effects, its fundamental forms are generated by an almost biological mode of evolution: changes in housing types and layouts come slowly, by minor increments, with new species of layouts dying off if they do not fulfill the needs of changing markets and varying profitability markers. As in nature, true innovation in housing is usually the response to a stressor, with artistic creativity being its means, not its end.
Historically, key housing forms in Canada were produced from such navigation of constraints and seizing of entrepreneurial opportunities. Hard rock foundations and the free availability of sawdust for furnaces led to Vancouver’s characteristic wood frame houses, in which the main level is raised up twelve steps—the most on the continent—to make room for bulky sawdust burners in the basement. (Those burners were removed between the wars and the lower levels turned into suites, meaning my home city’s houses were almost never single-family.) Toronto’s and Ottawa’s landscape-defining high-rise slab towers were the product of cheap concrete construction in cities without mid-block lanes, combined with the availability of new large-scale bank financing to developers.
Then there is Winnipeg. Not discounting innovations from the late David Penner, Stephen Cohlmeyer, and others, the current leading edge of Winnipeg housing is the output of a single firm, 5468796. The book just released by partners Johanna Hurme, Sasa Radulovic, and Colin Neufeld entitled platform.MIDDLE—a weighty collection of their housing ideas alongside built demonstrations—firmly secures 5468796 as one of the most important housing design firms on the continent. The trademark axonometric analytic diagrams collected there show how it is done, and any architect wanting to innovate in housing form and detail should study them.
This background is useful for understanding 5468796’s many accomplishments at Pumphouse (CA Award of Merit, December 2018), the most complex synthesis of their housing ideas to date. Pumphouse can be understood as a palimpsest of the entire run of housing innovations by 5468796 in their eighteen years of practice, a careful layering and modulation of their own previous design ideas.
As with other truly innovative designs shaped by housing’s evolutionary forces, Pumphouse emerged from a complex set of constraints: it sits on a site dominated by a large, low-slung heritage building occupied by bulky equipment that could not be removed because of a 1982 designation. There is little room for development along the edges of the site to offset the cost of restoring and opening access to the heritage building. While the property was listed for $1 by the city for several decades, and many have hoped to see the heritage structure reopened as a museum, dozens of previous proposals for redevelopment couldn’t pencil out.
The 1906 James Street Pumping Station itself was produced in response to one of the greatest urban stresses of those times—fire control in the face of conflagrations in Chicago, Vancouver and elsewhere that destroyed huge swaths of cities. Water was taken from the Red River and pressurized within the building’s Brontosaurus-scaled pumps, manufactured by the same Manchester company that built engines for the Titanic, to be distributed to fire mains throughout the adjacent Exchange and Warehouse districts. The Pumping Station’s equipment was built to last, and it served its original purpose until changes in firefighting precipitated its closure in 1986.
The desire to redevelop the property emerged in the following decades. A riverside rail spur line had long defined the eastern edge of downtown Winnipeg, blocking public access to the waterfront. In 1987, the city acquired the line and, at the turn of the millennium, replaced it with a road. New waterfront possibilities emerged, with a civic non-profit—CentreVenture—formed at the same time to encourage the area’s redevelopment.
In 2008, some of the earliest new housing in the area included 5468796’s youCUBE (2012) fairly conventional housing development at the north end of Waterfront Drive, and the Mere Hotel (2013) by David Penner and others, which transformed the Pumping Station’s waterside intake pavilion into a restaurant, and added a colourful block of boutique hotel rooms.
Johanna Hurme says the eventual development of the Pumping Station itself is the perfect illustration of 5468796’s long-standing and practice-defining dedication to what she calls “creative opportunism.” Starting in 2015, the firm started producing a string of increasingly sophisticated schemes for the pumphouse parcel, but with no commission and no payment for them. Co-founder Sasa Radulovic notes the hugely increased value of this site—courtesy of their imagination and hard work. Once thought useless, this heritage-listed building on a marginal site went from a nominal price of one dollar back then to a final value of one million dollars upon completion in 2023. “A one-million-times land lift is rare anywhere!” he jokes.
There is a lesson here to all young Canadian firms waiting by the phone for that call from Developer Mr. Right, or endlessly polishing their tiny portfolio on Photoshop for hoped-for webzines. A national reality and realty check, please: practicing architecture means far more of entrepreneurial improvisation than willful art or science. Winnipeg is one of the coldest architectural laboratories in the world and a comparatively underfunded one, and the difficult discipline of working there has honed 5468796’s brilliance. Please follow their lead, dear archi-brethren, and hustle with creativity and disciplined imagination around site and budget challenges, as they do.
A breakthrough was achieved when 5468796’s team (at that time including designer Kenneth Borton) realized that an office floor could be hung from an intact gantry crane, locating a new level above and to one side of the machine room. This created a visually stunning working perch that could be leased to a commercial tenant, tipping the building’s pro forma into viability. This early thinking impressed the young and formerly Victoria-based heritage developer Bryce Alston, who then received CentreVenture’s approval to take on the unusual project.
A new future for the heritage space being set, the architects went on to identify two zones for housing at either end of the pumphouse. The one at the west accommodates 70 units in a pair of wood and steel frame buildings set on concrete plinths, and a smaller single block at the river-facing eastern edge holds 28 more—this address now generates the highest rental rates in all of Winnipeg. Construction details are similar for all three blocks, and were kept simple: the only way Pumphouse would meet its financial targets was by using standard materials and workmanship. (The developer’s instructions, Radulovic recalls, were to make a design “that could be built by guys hired off Kijiji.”) Fire codes and access routes necessitated bridges to tie together the bifurcated project.
5468796’s existing portfolio equipped them well for dealing with the many additional challenges that arose from the dumbbell plan loading housing at either end, plus the complex layering of civic requirements for the space in-between. The east and west housing pavilions at the Pumphouse need to be understood as meta-projects, folding together ideas from 5468796’s eighteen years of practice, so a brief survey of those now. For instance, the city required views to be retained between the riverfront park walkway and a portion of the yellow-brick heritage structure. This led to a cutting back of ground-plane occupied space at the property’s southeast corner. Most of the rest of this main floor is now occupied by the Miesian temple of an entirely glass-wrapped hair salon overlooking the Red River—surely the nicest locale I have ever seen to get one’s curls chopped. On the west side of the Pumping Station, an access lane was required to be retained, resulting in a flanking cube of leftover space too far from windows for use as part of the west block housing. The solution? Adding tiered seats to this zone allows it to host resident gatherings, and serve as a covered amphitheatre during Winnipeg’s Fringe Theatre Festival. The playful inter-penetration of public and private space is a signature 5468796 theme, found in many of their designs.
The details and disposition of the rental housing units even more clearly show how 5468796 draws, with sagacity, from its own prior design ideas. The smallest of Pumphouse’s rental units feature Murphy beds and walk-through, glass-walled and double-doored bathrooms, to save space and borrow light, a trick refined in prior projects. On a larger scale, 5469796’s 2010 Bloc 10 project on Grant Avenue demonstrated how corridors can be eliminated for three-storey, stick-built walk-up apartment buildings. As both an ex-Edmontonian and ex-Winnipegger, I can attest that apartment corridors in these two cities smell permanently of boiled cabbage. There are no boiled cabbage smells at Pumphouse, as corridors are almost entirely outdoor and ventilated by soft Prairie breezes off the Red River. In the west wing, a parliament of eight doors (half of which access stairs to units above—a skip-stop arrangement seen in several previous 5468796 projects) form a raised open-air small piazza with compelling views south to the brickish pleasures of Exchange District architecture.
Noting that residents are not yet personalizing their entrances during our site tour, Radulovic pledged to buy each renter a pot for succulents and other hardy plants this spring. (Acts like this—to assist residents in realizing their fully inhabited potential of designs—ought to be the last phase of any housing commission, but sadly remain rare and “out of scope.”) It’s an idea that can be scaled up: open-air apartment lobbies with plantings—marketed as “sky gardens”—are similarly a feature on all 57 residential floors between the towers of Vancouver’s Butterfly, a project initiated by Bing Thom, and soon to be completed by Revery’s Venelin Kokalov. In the conservative realm of housing design, interrogating a feature as seemingly banal as corridors can be a breakthrough to innovation.
Hurme and Radulovic learned from the curving corridors of nearby 62M that vistas to neighbour’s doors help build both safety and community. Accordingly, one now cannot pass from the street, up Pumphouse’s dramatic exterior access stairs cantilevered out over public sidewalks, and then on to approach one’s own door without seeing many others, and at intriguingly different angles. Drawing again from Bloc 10, Pumphouse’s sections pack a surprising variety of unit types within the black box of its corrugated galvanized metal elevations. The Roman historian Suetonius quoted Emperor Augustus as saying, “I found Rome a city of bricks, and left it a city of marble,” and Arthur Erickson declared concrete “the marble of the twentieth century”; furthering the same line, corrugated metal has become cost-conscious Winnipeg’s signature cladding for the 21st century.
But this corrugated metal is black, entirely black, set in black frames, punctuated by black mullions, and so on; the building is a raven set amongst the sparrows and starlings of Waterfront Drive housing designed by other firms. The only time there is coloured relief from black metal, silver metal and grey concrete comes solely at night, and only when viewing the west elevation, where the gang-nailed soffits of panelized wood mill flooring can be seen through the large windows—a riot of colour by 5468796’s recent standards. Relax, my friends: a bit more generosity with smart hits of colour would humanize designs that are not nearly as aggressive in occupation as their blackness first indicates.
Where the designers have certainly got things right is in avoiding over-restoration of the yellow brick and steel trusses of the old Pumping Station. “We did not have budget to clean and repoint all the brick or repaint the metal, and they did not really need it,” says Radulovic. A patina of history remains on the Pumping Station, with its stains and cracks clear evidence of authenticity. Canada’s zealous over-restorers in the Federal Government and National Capital Commission need to go back and read William Morris’s 19th-century screeds against “scraping” the age and character off their restored buildings.
With their new book and breakthroughs into more ambitious large works such as the Pumphouse and Calgary’s Platform 9th Avenue Garage, 5468796 has evolved to the point where their repertoire of housing forms and details have emerged as the true genetic structure of the firm’s brand—so now, the camouflage of black can drop away. The gifts to all Winnipeggers from these architectural leaders in their renewed Pumphouse complex are many, but are crowned by gracious good humour, and an aggressive comfort with local realities. Oh, that all cities could be so lucky!
Trevor Boddy, FRAIC wrote the introduction to 5468796’s platform.MIDDLE book and participated in the original 2019 IIT housing symposium of that name that started the publication rolling. Boddy will co-lead tours of downtown housing and Erickson’s Smith House II at the RAIC national convention in Vancouver, May 12-15, 2024, where there will also be a platform.MIDDLE book launch and talks with Hurme and Radulovic.
CLIENT Alston Properties | STRUCTURAL Lavergne Draward & Associates | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/CIVIL MCW Consultants Ltd. | LANDSCAPE Scatliff + Miller + Murray | Interiors 5468796 Architecture | CONTRACTOR Brenton Construction | SURVEYOR Barnes & Duncan | CODE GHL Consultants | ENERGY Crosier Kilgour | AREA Heritage rehabilitation (office & hospitality): 1,670 m2; Multi-family residential: 7,110 m2 (incl. underground parking) | BUDGET $22 M | COMPLETION January 2024
ENERGY USE INTENSITY 138 KW/m2/year (PROJECTED) | THERMAL ENERGY USE INTENSITY 80 KW/m2/year (PROJECTED)