Archinect - News

A ‘pillar in the reconciliation of Indigenous and Western ways of living and building’ — design reveals a new public library in Saskatchewan

2022-10-12T21:21:00-04:00

A joint team of Formline, Chevalier Morales, and Montreal’s Architecture49 has revealed its design for a new library project in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The firms say the project is conceived as a “pillar in the reconciliation of Indigenous and Western ways of living and building” that will serve as an important precedent as the first “major public building” in an area with the highest ratio of Indigenous residents of any other major city in the country.

The new central library will link to the nearby Remai Modern Gallery and several small shops near the site to form a small new cultural hub along Second Avenue. The design team says it was directed by the city’s relatively low park-to-person ratio in the selection of form, materials, and the arrangement of public spaces in and around the 142,000-square-foot structure. Overall, some 45% of the site will include landscaped public spaces punctuated by the building's oval footprint.

Image courtesy Formline, Chevalier Morales, and Archi...

The grain elevators of the Canadian prairie are disappearing

2020-01-20T15:09:00-05:00

Grain elevators were once an icon of Canada’s west: often painted a bright boxcar red, they stood in towns across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. [...] In the 1930s there were nearly 6,000 towers; now fewer than a thousand remain. The destruction, in many ways, mirrors the broader decline of rural communities in western Canada.

For The Guardian, journalist Leyland Cecco on the struggle of small agricultural communities in Canada's prairie provinces to preserve their aging, wooden grain elevators as cultural heritage monuments.

Restored Alberta Wheat Pool elevators at the Canadian Grain Elevator Discovery Centre in Nanton, Alberta. Photo: Tony Hisgett

Once the pride of every community and dubbed "prairie castles" for their often imposing heights in the flat landscape, thousands of them were left to rot and eventually faced demolition. Only a handful of lucky structures managed to win protection status, such as at the Canadian Grain Elevator Discovery Centre in Nanton, Alberta or the Prairie Elevator Museum in Acadia, AB.

A student architect's plan to repurpose grain elevators into community spaces

2015-07-21T10:52:00-04:00

[Ali] Piwowar, who studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, wrote her masters thesis in architecture on preserving the heritage of grain elevators by transforming them into community spaces. Saskatchewan once had over 3,000 wooden grain elevators. One by one, however, the structures have been disappearing from the skyline, victims of changing economic and transportation conditions. Today, Piwowar estimates there are around 400 such elevators remaining with only 80 in working order.

More from the world of grain elevators and their reuse potentials: