“Winnipeg only has two seasons,” someone told me, on my first day in the city: “snow and mosquitoes.”

It was early April 2018, with temperatures hovering around -18°C (0°F) with wind-chill, and I had challenged myself to explore as much of the city as possible on foot. The Winnipeggers I met would ask me why I chose to visit Winnipeg in winter. Other Canadians would ask me why I chose to visit Winnipeg at all.

Much of downtown Winnipeg is linked together by a network of tunnels, malls and building-to-building skywalks, so that pedestrians rarely need to set foot outside in the coldest months. It’s a system built on necessity – Winnipeg has known record lows approaching -50°C (-58°F). Even the downtown bus stops are incorporated into the building complexes: heated roadside cubicles protruding like eyestalks from the shopping malls. I had decided to forgo such luxuries however. An indoor shopping centre looks more or less the same, whether you’re in Canada or Britain or Malaysia. But to really feel this city, to understand it, I needed to be outside. Out there amongst the concrete, ice and crows.

Sleepwalking

In his film My Winnipeg, the Canadian director Guy Maddin describes his hometown as “always winter, always sleeping”… a place where “the breath freezes in front of your face and falls to the street with a tinkle,” and whose history, and stories, lay hidden beneath “thin layers of time, asphalt and snow.” The film blurs fact and fiction, history and imagination, to create a very personal psychogeography of the city – what Maddin calls a “docu-fantasia.”

In his narration, the director expresses a conflict between his deep fascination and nostalgia for Winnipeg, and his preoccupation with getting out. He recalls a treasure hunt from his youth (perhaps real, perhaps not), an annual event sponsored by the railway company, which “required our citizens to wander our city in a day-long combing of the streets and neighbourhoods. First prize was a one-way ticket on the next train out of town.” But in a hundred years, says Maddin, no winner had ever accepted the prize. The railway company wanted to prove that nobody who had really taken the time to study this city would ever want to leave it. (Though Maddin counters: “It must be the sleepiness that keeps Winnipeggers here.”)

Below a certain temperature, salt doesn’t work on ice. So in Winnipeg winters they use sand for traction instead, spreading a network of yellow-brown trails throughout the city. Bracing against the freezing winds, I followed the yellow road down to the Forks: the ancient heart of Winnipeg.

Rivers are often the key to making sense of a city. Rivers were there before roads, before rails; they are a source of life, but they also define the geography to which a city must respond. Winnipeg was built at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, right at the centre of the North American continent. (In case you needed a reminder of just how big Canada is, consider that Winnipeg, one of the coldest cities in the world, is only halfway from the Caribbean to the Arctic.) The place where these rivers meet – the Forks – has been an important site for Indigenous cultures going back millennia. Archeologists have found traces of bison hunting and fishing camps here, dated to roughly 4,000 BCE, and Elders say it was a place where different nations would meet for trade and politics.

The name “Winnipeg” comes from the river too: according to the oral history of the Cree, it means “Muddy Waters.” Continuing this 6,000-year tradition, The Forks remains a meeting place today – where an indoor market, featuring a complex of bars and eateries, is one of modern Winnipeg’s main social hubs. The winter opens up new opportunities, too. When the river freezes it becomes a hiking trail, and families set out from the Forks along the frozen waterways, with ice skates and picnic baskets.

Nearby, a newer building catches the eye. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is an extraordinary, organic work of post-modernist architecture. Opened in 2014, it was designed by the architect Antoine Predock whose idea was to embed the building symbolically in the elements: “carved into the earth and dissolving into the sky.” The building’s hull of locally sourced limestone represents the mountains of Canada; the steel and glass panels that wrap around them, like a bird’s wings, are the clouds; while rising from the centre, the building’s 100-metre tower is presented as a snow-capped peak – and a beacon, both literally and figuratively, that lights the skyline of Winnipeg.

Chicago of the North

One might think of cold places as being unfriendly, but in Winnipeg I seemed to be constantly finding myself in conversation with strangers on the street. Multiple times people stopped to ask what I was photographing, and then recommended other buildings that I might also find interesting. I spent maybe fifteen minutes at a bus stop talking to one man about classic rock bands (I don’t even remember how that started). Another time, stepping out of Tim Hortons on Broadway into a near-blizzard, a passer-by on the other side of the road yelled: “I LIKE YOUR HAT! YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY NOW.”

Following the Red River north took me to the Exchange District: perhaps the most architecturally diverse corner of Winnipeg, where terra cotta-clad skyscrapers and old brick warehouses (some of them still featuring vintage, painted advertisements), rub shoulders with 1960s minimalism, and Greek porticos replete with Corinthian columns. But the Canadian Grain Commission Building dominates the district, a smooth, square concrete tower completed in 1973.

Winnipeg is a city of many layers – a “city of palimpsests,” according to Guy Maddin – and you can read its history from its buildings; like counting the rings in a tree trunk. It was founded in 1873: a fur trading post turned permanent settlement, the modern city then grew from the lifeblood of the Grand Trunk Railway. Maddin calls these tracks the “steel arteries” of the city.

As the heart of the Canadian grain industry, by 1911, Winnipeg was the richest and third-largest city in Canada. It was the fastest-growing city anywhere in North America, and politicians of the era boasted that Winnipeg would reach a population of 3 million by the 1950s. The drains they built beneath the streets were large enough for a city of 10 million people. They named it the “Chicago of the North,” and many of Winnipeg’s turn-of-the-century buildings were constructed in what became known as the Chicago style – neoclassical proto-skyscrapers, their masonry facades dominated by large plate-glass windows. Hollywood studios have frequently used Winnipeg as a stand-in for 1920s Chicago.

However, despite these early affectations of opulence, Winnipeg was always a workers’ city at heart. Along with furs, forestry and grain, the region also saw mining for metals like nickel, copper, zinc and gold, as well as industrial-scale quarrying for salt, granite, and limestone. A large portion of the workforce was made of immigrants, with a significant population of Ukrainians – 170,000 of whom settled in Canada between 1896 and 1914, escaping the taxes and tyranny of the Russian Tsar to strike out anew in the Americas.

In the difficult years after WWI, Winnipeg’s working class immigrants were amongst the hardest hit by unemployment, and housing and food shortages. In 1917, the Russian working class overthrew their own government, and news of the Great October Socialist Revolution emboldened Canadian unionists and labour leaders. The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was the largest workers’ strike in Canadian history: 30,000 people left their jobs, and many of the city’s services ground to a total standstill. Some newspapers at the time blamed the strike on “Eastern European Bolsheviks.”

By the mid-1950s, Winnipeg’s architects would fully embrace the Brutalist style. Brutalism was then a new global trend, a style of practicality and purpose in architecture that eschewed bourgeois ornamentation in favour of celebrating the nuts and bolts of architectural function. In place of the terra cotta façades of the Chicago style, these new Brutalist buildings made features out of their external staircases, their ventilation shafts or pedestrian walkways. There was no pretension, nothing hidden – but rather each building’s usefulness became a part of its visual character.

Jeffrey Thorsteinson from the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation told me that the arrival of Brutalism here was likely an example of the Bauhaus Effect: “From 1939 to 1959, you have Mies van der Rohe teaching at IIT [the Illinois Institute of Technology] in Chicago, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard … There’d be a great deal of transference of the European Modernist culture in America through those key personalities. Many of Winnipeg’s key Brutalists might have studied there during that period.”

A little further up Main Street I was completely immersed in Brutalism. The rectangular-fronted Centennial Concert Hall looks like some kind of vast, futuristic contraption – its windows like ventilation grills, its sloped back resembling concrete bellows.

A block away across the street, I visited another hefty bulk of a building, with vertical limestone lattices down its windows that gave the impression of a cage. The Public Safety Building, as it is called, was formerly the headquarters of the Winnipeg Police, though its name sounded to me like some Orwellian government ministry. Moisture damage to the limestone façade has caused some sections to fall away over the years. In an ironic twist, the sidewalk beneath the Public Safety Building was enclosed in a protective walkway in 2006, as the building itself had become a threat to public safety. (Later, after my visit, the building was scheduled for full demolition.)

The block between the Centennial Concert Hall and the Public Safety Building is given over to Winnipeg City Hall. Whereas those buildings on either side present quite dense and imposing forms, the city hall is a smaller concrete building with a gentler profile, surrounded by flower beds and trees. Out front, the white globe streetlights give it a 1960s retro-utopia feel.

However, some Winnipeggers told me that they find this building hard to love – largely because of what it isn’t. The new City Hall replaced an older building, Winnipeg’s second City Hall (1886-1962) which was described as a “Victorian fantasy,” six storeys of brick and stone, with porticos, turrets and a clock. This iconic landmark was demolished in 1962 however, despite public protest and calls to conserve it as a library or museum. (You can see images of the old building here and here.)

As Guy Maddin wryly comments, “Demolition is one of our only growth industries.”

On the Main Street side of Winnipeg City Hall stands a monument to the victims of the Holodomor: the terror-famine that killed millions in Ukraine between 1932-33. It was placed here in respect of the city’s significant Ukrainian population, and as I stood there by the monument, I almost forgot where I was…

I had just flown in from a winter visit to Kyiv, where I had been photographing Brutalist architecture and monuments in the snow. Stood here on a wintry, concrete-lined street, looking at a Holodomor monument (and just earlier I had passed Winnipeg’s monument of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko), I had to keep reminding myself that I was on a different continent now.

The People’s Theatre

Another day during my stay in Winnipeg, I met with Susan Algie and Jeffrey Thorsteinson from the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation. They drove me out to the University of Manitoba campus, further down the Red River, to see its plaza of late-1960s Brutalist halls and student union buildings.

In his own work, Jeffrey Thorsteinson notes how: “Brutalism in Canada was often associated with large-scale, institutional projects related to the arts and academia”; and he points to how “certain aspects of Brutalism … reflect not only a rejection of the International Style but also attitudes related to the various social movements then occurring.” Herein though, he finds a contradiction: “the common use of a more polished version of Brutalism in the construction of corporate architecture and skyscrapers speaks to the fact that Brutalism also reflects economic and technological patterns, possibly in contrast with such social goals.”

As we walked around the university campus, we tried to pin down the characteristics of Manitoba’s own, homegrown Brutalist movement.

The Duff Roblin Building, for instance, is one of a number of Brutalist constructions in Winnipeg that for its exterior largely forgoes concrete, in favour of locally-sourced Manitoba Tyndall limestone. The same stone appears on the Public Safety Building, and numerous other buildings throughout the University of Manitoba campus – though its use here, in raw and imposing forms, adheres neatly with the international Brutalist aesthetic. Up close to the building, Susan pointed to the outlines of ancient fossils in the limestone, corals and trilobites, an effect that gave this otherwise sheer and weighty building an unusual organic quality.

Robson Hall, which houses the university’s Faculty of Law, has the feel of some ancient theatre, but here formed from precast concrete panels with rough textured limestone facing.

My favourite campus building was the University Centre though, otherwise known as the Student Union Building: a five-storey “inverted ziggurat” in poured and pre-cast concrete. Located at the centre of the campus, this building was designed with office and dining spaces, conference halls, lounges and a bookshop, while also forming the nexus between a series of climate-controlled tunnels fanning out beneath the campus. Jeffrey explains its conception “as a main street that could act as a market, plaza or venue for speech and debate.”

Inside the University Centre we walked through the refectory, today busy with students, where bare concrete walls and a waffle-effect ceiling came together to create a space with a lot more warmth and intimacy than one might expect from such materials.

Susan and Jeffrey finished our tour with a visit to what is perhaps one of the most pure – and wholesome – examples of Brutalism that I’ve seen on any continent: the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

From outside the building appears immense, a sheer mass of concrete. Stepping inside though, visitors find themselves in the spacious and bright “north lobby,” lit by a series of inset windows and skylights positioned at angles that make them invisible from the street.

The architect Allan Waisman explained how: “Around the lobby, a series of spaces were provided to allow for an audience to mingle casually. … Nowhere were there to be grand staircases, marble or chintz. The feeling all along was to make people feel as comfortable in jeans as they might in a tuxedo.”

In fitting with this philosophy, there are no grand entrance steps going up and into the theatre – rather, symbolically, it sits at the same level as the street outside. The open interiors meanwhile are designed to continue this idea of equality. From the north lobby, visitors get an unobscured view straight into the rehearsal hall and the wardrobe department. (I was told that the curtains are only drawn shut when performers are changing costumes, or rehearsing in states of undress.) Peering over a banister from the lobby, visitors can look down onto the paint shop, and the carpentry shop beyond. All the working parts of the theatre machine are visible to be appreciated.

Our guide at the theatre, Mary Horodyski, and other theatre staff, seemed to have a very deep love for their building. I asked a lot of questions, and Mary was quick to invite me back for another visit the next day – allowing me to wander the corridors, balconies and lobby at my own speed with a camera and tripod. When I asked her about the construction process, she took me into a staff office and let me pore through the photographic archives.

Later, in 2019, I was working on an article about the alleged haunting of Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Hotel. During my research for that piece I stumbled across claims that the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre was also home to a ghostly apparition. The Heritage Winnipeg blog, for example, alleges that: “staff have reported many strange occurrences. … items go missing and then reappear in the exact same spot only moments later. … giggling and running footsteps when no one else is present. While working late one night, a set designer claimed to see a young boy run through his workshop.”

The blog repeats a local story about a young boy in a wheelchair, who was trapped in a fire at the former theatre building and is believed by some to haunt the new theatre to this day. So I wrote to MTC about it and I heard back from Laurie Lam, a theatre producer. “I have it on good authority that there are ghosts in the building,” she told me, “though I have never sensed them in my 33 years here.” The story about the fire was nonsense though: “Our city’s best theatre historian debunked that myth. Our theatre never had a devastating fire in any of our six buildings.”

I found it somehow fitting though, this urban myth about a childish apparition playing tricks on people in the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. A ghost in the machine. Anthropomorphised concrete. The perceived presence of a mischievous spirit seemed to lend the building more personality… and made me think of the architecture critics who talk about “dwelling with” as opposed to “dwelling in” Brutalist buildings.

As Guy Maddin said: “Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism.”

Going Home

On my flight into Winnipeg, I had passed the time playing a game called Night in the Woods. The story is about a character who drops out of college, and returns to their hometown of Possum Springs: a North American city that was established as a fur trading settlement, and later grew with the coal industry, before facing a wave of unemployment and decline after the mine was closed. Essentially it’s a game about nostalgia, about going home (for better or worse), and about the confused and noisy ghosts of a city whose history can be traced back through alternating eras of boom and bust.

Night in the Woods had a powerful emotional effect on me, and a lot of the ideas in the game seemed to echo those expressed by Maddin in My Winnipeg. I found myself thinking about the game a lot, as I explored Winnipeg that week. It was only later that I discovered the game’s designer was a Winnipegger himself.

It is hard to explain exactly, but Winnipeg – even on my first visit – felt like coming home.

At the end of that April week in 2018, I had a three-flight journey back to Europe and my first transfer was in Toronto Pearson Airport. As I waited near the departure gate, a woman approached me with a clipboard. She said she was doing research on tourism. I took her survey – and when she asked how long I had been in Toronto I explained I was only transferring through this time.

“Ahh, okay,” she said. “So where did you visit in Canada?” Her pen hovered over a list of checkboxes (Montreal, Vancouver, Quebec…), and I told her Winnipeg, but there wasn’t a box for that so she had to add a written note.

In 2019 I read a story online titled “How Winnipeg Became Canada’s Comeback City.” The author largely seemed to focus on the gentrification of the Exchange Warehouse District, with its microbreweries, pop-up pizzerias and “Insta-famous cake shops.” And it’s true, Winnipeg does have all of those things. But so do Toronto, London, and Kyiv. I don’t think Winnipeg needs a “comeback,” or a catch-up, though – because it’s already ahead in ways that matter more, in my opinion.

In Toronto, when strangers said Hey, how are you? and instead of repeating the same thing back with a forced smile I actually answered them (sometimes in detail), I was met by looks of sheer terror. In comparison, Winnipeg has not a shred of superficiality about it. Every interaction felt genuine and authentic. Its abundant Brutalist design then, is perhaps the most wonderfully appropriate architectural expression – for a city that offers raw, rugged charm without facade.

Winnipeg Gallery

With thanks to: Guy Maddin, who I had the great pleasure of meeting for dinner and drinks on my subsequent visit to Winnipeg in 2019; Susan Algie and Jeffrey Thorsteinson at the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation; the wonderful staff at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre; Gillian Chester and the team at Tourism Winnipeg; and to Dr Frank Albo, for introducing me to Winnipeg in the first place.