St. John’s Library
Public City’s Role
Architecture, Landscape Architecture
Team
Wolfrom Engineering, MCW Consultants
Client
City of Winnipeg
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The St. John's Library bridges common themes of gathering and story into a vitrine that captures a nuance of rapidly changing relationships to knowledge and a collective desire to preserve civic artifacts. This 1915 Carnegie building anchors its north-end Winnipeg site through a century of neighborhood change. A new south-facing entrance plaza transforms the library's relationship to street and community, replacing barriers with a gesture that says, welcome. The renovation extends the reading room into the public space through integrated benches and gathering places. The sculptural, heavy galvanized steel rainwater lead and entry canopy against the thin curtain of glass mark a tense threshold between city and sanctuary, the tough and the fragile, the permanent and the ephemeral. The site’s intensive stormwater management garden was designed to demonstrate long-tested approaches to site water control from other cities to local operations for consideration in future projects.
