Arthur Erickson

Read an fascinating story about the sad state of Winnipeg’s Public Safety Building in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. The modernist building was completed in 1966 as part of a pre-centennial government-building boom—a familiar story to us, sitting as we are in our own centennial-era building.

Today, the Public Safety Building’s limestone facade is crumbling; a grim, wrap-around awning prevents pieces from hitting pedestrians. The building’s occupants, the Winnipeg Police Service, will move out in three years, and after that, who knows? One city councillor says the city is looking at “disposing” of the building unless someone is interested in buying it and taking on the costly exterior repair work. The full story is linked here.

As reporter Patrick White notes, it’s just one of several endangered modernist structures in the prairie city. Winnipeg’s loved and hated airport terminal will be rendered obsolete by a new terminal set to open by the end of 2010. Despite an exhibit of the city’s modernist buildings in 2006—details in an archived CBC article linked here—and a newfound appreciation for modernist architecture in places like Azure, Dwell, and Metropolis magazines, it remains a hard sell to the masses, who view it as cold, imposing, even authoritarian. But popular or not, buildings like the Public Safety Building represent a important moment in Canada’s history; a time when money flowed for public spaces designed to evoke stability and permanence as a young country turned 100.

The public buildings found in Vanier Park rode that same funding wave. The building that houses the Museum of Vancouver and the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre was built in the more decorative New Formalist style and completed in 1968, while buildings erected around us in the following decade, including the Vancouver Archives, the Gordon MacMillan Southam Observatory, and the Vancouver Academy of Music took on a more spare, brutalist form. Taken together, we form a suburban-style cultural precinct, connected by rolling lawns and parking lots.

Vancouver is perhaps only slightly more reflective of its modernist architecture than Winnipeg, owed to the internationally celebrated work of architects like Arthur Erickson and Ron Thom who practiced from here. It’s hard to imagine a Vancouver City Councillor speaking so candidly of demolishing a modernist building. Whatever the future holds for the PSB, and other buildings like it, we hope there will be some careful debate on its place in the city’s built history. For the record, we think it’s a place worth saving.