5468796, who are among Canada’s most hard-driving and ambitious architects, figured out how to add office space and bookend the building with two glossy black apartment buildings.James Brittain/James Brittain Photography
The James Avenue Pumping Station was ready to be wrecked. A 1906 yellow brick pile along Winnipeg’s Red River, half-filled with ancient machinery, the building had outwitted more than a dozen developers whose plans to remake it had failed.
Then local architects came up with a better idea. In 2015, Winnipeg’s 5468796 Architecture took a hard look at the city-owned building and discovered its capacity to hold more space and to be remade for the future.
“There had been attempts and attempts to save this structure,” recalls 5468796 partner Sasa Radulovic. “We thought, we’ve got to be smart enough to figure something out.”
And they were. 5468796, who are among Canada’s most hard-driving and ambitious architects, figured out how to add office space and bookend the building with two glossy black apartment buildings. Then they brought in a developer and made it happen. The resulting development, Pumphouse, is a clockwork of technical and spatial innovation clever enough to win a recent Governor-General’s Medal in Architecture.
The project, which includes 93 apartments and 50,000 square feet of office space, has lessons for designers and builders across the country: That architectural thinking – and grit – can unlock value in unlikely places.
For the architects, the exploration began in the dark. “We got the keys to the building and went to have a look,” recalls Radulovic. “It was a winter night, December or January, and there was no electricity. So with our flashlights we looked at these beautiful old gantry cranes, and there were signs saying they are rated to carry 20,000 pounds each.” With that, the architects wondered: could the building’s structure support a second floor?
It could: 50,000 square feet of office space, suspended above the historically designated water pumps which once supplied the fire hydrants of the adjacent Exchange District. And the building’s site along the Red River could also support not one but two additional apartment buildings: one to the west, and one to the east on a 40-foot sliver of land that fronted the Red River.
Having convinced Mr. Alston to take the project on, the architects navigated the sale of the site and a long planning process, including negotiating with the city’s historical buildings committee. To satisfy heritage requirements, the new riverfront building could not obstruct the pumphouse’s views to the river. Today, it is: steel columns elevate the riverfront building, and a complex network of outdoor corridors and stairs remains elevated above the ground.
To leave the building, residents walk along outdoor walkways to an elevator or across a bridge into the old pumphouse. The links between the three structures solve a complex set of building-code and spatial challenges.
This arrangement, including outdoor passageways that connect with units on every second level, is very odd. But it works. “That provides a meaningful experience to the residents,” says 546 partner Colin Neufeld, who collaborated on the project. “You are looking out over the city and looking out over the river, passing your neighbours’ doors along the way.”
And because of the outdoor corridors, each apartment has windows in two directions – a valuable thing for quality of life, and rare in multifamily buildings.
Over the past 15 years, 5468796 has developed and deployed many such offbeat strategies. Their building 62M, only a few minutes from the Pumphouse, has the form of a flying saucer on stilts. They have become experts in navigating the landscape of Winnipeg, where building is technically challenging, construction costs are high and rents are not. Yet the smallness of the city allows for a certain nimbleness in planning and design. (There is no way this building’s approach to heritage design would have been permitted in Toronto.)
In recent years 5468796 have pursued an activist agenda around multifamily housing. Radulovic and his wife and partner Johanna Hurme, who co-founded the firm in 2007, have travelled as visiting professors and speakers across North America. Their 2019 publication platform.Middle brought together architects and theorist from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to explore the possibilities for mid-scale housing, and ways in which architects can play a prominent role in imagining and delivering it.
So what are the lessons of the Pumphouse project? “Persistence,” Radulovic says. “Our team stuck with this project for years to make it work. Every city is different, and the specific answers will be different. So you need to apply that level of thinking and persistence to what you want to do.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed comments by Colin Neufeld to colleague Ken Borton, another partner in 5468796 Architecture. This version has been updated.