FOREST PAVILION

FOREST PAVILION
Winnipeg, Manitoba

2022 Governor General’s Medal in Architecture, RAIC

Forest Pavilion is a four-season structure constructed on Treaty One land in the floodway zone of the Red River, at Crescent Drive Park, in southwest Winnipeg.  It is a first civic structure of its kind to apply protective FEMA flood design standards.  All materials below the flood-line can be completely submerged without decay. The concrete base is designed with upstands to raise framing sole plates, and pressure relief strategies in the wall are concealed to keep water moving.  The plan is also designed to shed flowing water by reducing right angles, introducing large swinging wall panels in the middle of the plan, using no floor mounted fixtures, and specifying stainless doors, frames, and fasteners below flood-line.  

Apart from providing three new public washrooms, there are also three new types of outdoor room designed to address the impacts of a changing climate on urban parks. The first of these is the Shade Room. This is a roofed hallway through the Pavilion providing respite from increasing summer temperatures. Adjacent to it is an insulated room that has passive ventilation. The room provides tempered space to warm oneself up in winter, and in summer it is a place away from the driving rain or hot prairie wind.   The third room is an open-sky gathering room with a central fire feature. With its 5-metre-tall screen walls, it is an outdoor/indoor cultural and casual gathering area.  Forest Pavilion embraces its own hearth.  

No trees were felled in the construction of Forest Pavilion. It is designed to nestle into an existing clearing atop the site's highpoint. By taking advantage of the topography, the necessary constructed flood-protection measures were reduced. Sustainable building choices include native planting, the use of durable hot-dipped galvanized steel, mechanically fastened (so as to be easily replaced) rough-sawn fir that was sourced and milled using sustainable harvest practices, and super low-flow plumbing fixtures, LED lighting, and occupancy sensors to reduce consumption.  

A lantern that is highly visible to the adjacent spaces, the Pavilion dissolves day to night from form to void. Its vibrant chartreuse interior of venetian-finish plaster is a dramatic welcome to visitors at night -- a porch light in the forest. Spaced in a syncopated rhythm, the vertical fir screen that wraps interior and exterior rooms takes its reference from how we perceive space, light, and forms through a forest and folds this phenomenon into a single form from which views and access points are sculpted away.  

This is a hub that supports parents minding their children at the nearby playground, cyclists passing through, cultural gatherings, or the multitude of multi-seasonal sports and events that take place here from shinny to birding, family get-togethers to healing circles. Forest Pavilion is a multi-functional civic asset built on very tight budget over six years. Its program is less defined by established past uses or conventional Park pavilion ideas, but more-so by an opportunity to respond to experience and the emergence of the cultural and climatic landscapes around which it evolves.