The strategy is one of literally ‘playing in the snow’, in homage to Winnipeg’s complicated relationship with winter that finds pleasure in the cold: the popular annual Festival du Voyageur is held outside in the middle of February, and the world’s longest natural ice skating path sits high in Winnipeg’s civic consciousness. A love/hate duality that marks the existential dilemma of the city dweller in reference to the realities of their climate (death is never far from one’s thoughts on cold winter nights) points to a poetic tension within that relationship full of possibility for architectural engagement. liquid to solid : the project unfolds as a series of experiments in the basic matter of site – water and ice - as material for construction. The existing pump house becomes a land-locked laboratory for a series of constructive operations. Blocks of ice cut from the river surface become substitute windows, filtering light through their watery depths into the building during the day and lighting up the river landscape at night. Blocks are stacked to make massive ice walls clad in driftwood screens. Other experiments involve the misting of cables and fabric hung within the building’s riverfront recesses in thin icy layers. Rooms in the form of human scale ice-lanterns allow one to inhabit ice’s mysterious inner realms of captured air bubbles, particles and maps of cracks, while receiving the world through its thickness. Multiple techniques –casting, accretive misting, cutting, milling, welding and carving – use water’s in-situ transition from liquid to solid at the scale of building component (i.e. slab/wall), surface (misted skin) and connector (water weld). Construction is celebrated in its sequential un-folding and its material ephemerality. winter-centric architecture: a program develops through continued constructional explorations and the poetic realities of place. Here, a weathering steel tower, anchored to the riverbed with a gabion foundation, extends from the face of the pump house out into the centre of the river. It is a framework for an annual ritual of ice-making, echoing the pump house history
of drawing water from the river, but for dramatically different purposes. A small mobile pump and spray rigs shroud the tower frame in a skin of ice-misted fabric, gradually veiling its walkways and voids as temperatures plummet and material thickness increases. A thin ice wall at the tower’s core serves as a climbing surface for members of the Alpine Club of Canada and as a spectacle for the public in their wintery wanderings. At ice level, the tower is an armature for ice construction experiments: a network of tension cables and spray hoses together generate an architecture that shifts and transforms throughout the sub-zero season. In its cyclical existence the architectural body is always partial, and never static. Equilibrium shifts across many levels: structurally, the seasonal loading of the frame is balanced by the bracing presence of the frozen river and the accumulation of ice mass at critical structural joints for strength. Formally and materially, the architecture uses the propensity of ice (water in conversation with the forces of gravity and temperature in the transition from liquid to solid) to find a means of supporting itself. solid to liquid: as winter turns to spring, the architecture turns from playground to graveyard as it gives itself up to the raw forces of nature. The thick steel plates protecting the tower structure chronicle the annual battering by ice floes and debris carried by the force of the river — hyper-weathered sculptures that depict the brutal but poetic reality of their situation. The ephemeral skin of the tower is shed, returning to whence it came. As the waters of the river are renewed, the tower stands quietly in hibernation. The project suggests architectural possibilities for seasonal delight in the material realities of the climate, seeking a means of architectural making that resonates with the temporal cycles and transformations that give the city its seasonal lifeblood. Architecture, in its inhabitation and materiality, might well celebrate the cold and see the opportunities and beauty that lie within it. *
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weather matters: On Site review 21
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