PROJECT Cornish Library, Winnipeg, Manitoba
ARCHITECT Public City Architecture
TEXT Lawrence Bird
PHOTOS Lindsay Reid Photography
A glass box addition to the rear of the library improves its accessibility, and also offers a sheltered space with an outdoor faucet for people sleeping rough nearby.
For Public City Architecture, all projects begin with the urban condition. In their renovation of Winnipeg?s Cornish Public Library, the firm had to negotiate a particularly tricky situation. The library sits on the edge of a privileged neighbourhood?Armstrong?s Point?whose residents are highly aware of the heritage value of ?their? library, and resistant to changes to its front entrance. Behind the library, people sleep rough under the Maryland Bridge on the Assiniboine River. A daily flood of commuters cross the same bridge, with a view only of the library?s rear elevation, not of its front. The firm has solved accessibility issues (the original remit of the project) through a subtle front ramp and deftly integrated elevator and universal washroom; they also restored heritage woodwork. But the project?s most clever gesture is completely new: the addition of a reading room which appears, at first, to be a simple glass prism. Closer examination reveals a clever reconciliation of the contradictory geometries of

existing building and adjacent road. The solution also goes some ways towards reconciling more difficult aspects of the city.
Public City has oriented two of the room?s glas...