PROJECT Windsor Park Library, Winnipeg, Manitoba
ARCHITECTS david penner architect + h5 architecture
TEXT Lawrence Bird
PHOTOS Click.Studio / Lindsay Reid
The low-slung, triangular form of the library responds to the Prairie landscape and to site constraints. Disciplined planning and careful detailing combine in a deftly crafted building.
The Prairie landscape plays out at the very large scale. Immense natural and infrastructural geometries stretch relentlessly across the land, before slipping into each other at odd angles: rail lines intersect, ribbons of water cut into farm grids. Winnipeg itself, as an urban form, is generated out of such collisions between railways, roads, rivers and land use patterns.
It takes skill and know-how for an architect to accommodate immense geometries?so often the result of planning and infrastructural accidents?in a jewel of a building. This is what David Penner and h5 architecture (with principal Hélio Rodrigues) have achieved in their Windsor Park Library. It?s the third project they have designed together, and a small building. Nevertheless, it accommodates not only the accidental geometries of the city and region, but also the shifting technologies and social changes playing out today at a global scale. Floor plan
The library is bordered by five urban features: to the east, the four-lane arterial Archibald Road and a Canadian Pacific main line running parallel to it; to the south, Bonivital public swimming pool; to the north and west, ...