Warm Your Toes, Open Your Mind
Along Winnipeg’s River Trail

Warming Huts Become Architectural Showcase

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Canada, Jan. 21, 2010 — Skaters, skiers and strollers, get ready to see some extreme architecture along Manitoba’s most famous winter trail this year. The Assiniboine Credit Union River Trail will soon be home to five architectural marvels, each cleverly designed as a warming hut.

The Warming Hut: An Art +Architecture Exposition on Ice will showcase the inspirations of world-famous architects and artists. The huts will also provide a place to have a seat and warm up those frosty noses along a pathway that holds the Guinness record for the world’s longest naturally frozen trail at The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Get ready to see some ‘out there’ designs out there. One plan lists pop cans among its building materials, another resembles an extra large piece of crumpled aluminum foil and a third is a giant orange orb suspended just above the frozen river. Each team includes architects or landscape architects, a visual artist and a construction crew.

“This event is really intended to showcase art and architecture in a setting that is otherwise reserved for the mundane and practical,” says Peter Hargraves of Sputnik Architecture one of the organizers of the event. “It’s an intentional exploration of human experiences. In the same way we feel cold and warmth these huts are meant to evoke feelings and create dialogue.”

Each team has a budget of $9,000 to design and construct a warming hut. Building begins Jan. 25 on land. The huts will be moved to the ice surface by Feb. 1.

The exposition is part of Manitoba Homecoming 2010, a yearlong celebration that will bring together former and current residents for festivals and fun.

“This new event is a perfect fit for Manitoba Homecoming 2010 and we’re really excited to be a part of it,” says Kevin Walters, Executive Director, Manitoba Homecoming 2010. “Showcasing our local talent keeps with our theme of featuring all that is great about Manitoba. This is just one more reason to come home in 2010. This is a first for Manitoba and a first for Canada. It will be something to see.”

Meet The Warming Huts

CARCASS
Architect: Sputnik Architecture
Artist: Jonathon Pylypchuk
The warming hut is constructed of laminated wood rafters and skinned in aluminum and polycarbonate panels. The form is intended to describe the tension between past, present and future; from time pre-historic to time held captive in the imagination.

ICE CUBE
Architect: 701 architecture inc.
Artist: Soul Seeker Images
The warming hut alludes to historic voyageur or aboriginal constructions along the river with the use of the cedar cladding. The form of the hut is developed by combining the square planters and triangular marker forms of the sundial to make an angled cube. Because of the structure’s transparent nature, the illumination allows the cube to be a lantern or a beacon in the night.

SUNSPOT
Architect: 5468796 architecture
Artist: Ewa Trasia
The sunspot sphere is an extension of Ewa’s exploration of a dot, a re-occurring theme in her recent work, as well as an interpretation of the ultimate source of heat—the sun. The sphere will hang from the Forks’ bridge and hover just a few feet above the frozen river. A large circular opening at the bottom of the sphere allows skaters to enter from beneath and experience the transformed sky. The edge of the opening provides a bench to rest on, and the structure itself a shelter from the wind.

FIR HUT
Architect: Richard Kroeker
Artist: Neil Forrest
Borrowing inspiration from the early Native American designs and materials, the project is an exhibition of the combination of these ancient techniques, with modern materials (pop cans) in a seamless new whole. Kroeker learned the technique of thatching balsam fir from the Mi’kmaq people of Atlantic Canada.

APPARITION
Architect: Antoine Predock Architect PC with Scatliff+Miller+Murray Landscape Architects
A haunting, ambiguous object enmeshed with the icy realm, snowdrifts on this geologic microcosm while glaciers in miniature advance and recede in the aluminum folds. Solar-fueled lighting within the wooden structure focuses the entry aperture with an inviting, glowing promise of inner respite.

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Footnote: Antoine Predock Architect PC is also the creative force behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights now under construction in Winnipeg, Manitoba.