Students play 'what if' in the Exchange

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Works hang suspended from the ceiling of the gallery.

Winnipeg's Exchange District has incredible credentials. The 20-block neighbourhood has been designated a National Historic Site and is up for UNESCO recognition. One of the most intact turn-of-the-20th-century commercial areas in North America, it has street corners where a 360-degree panorama won't hit anything constructed after 1914. It holds 62 significant heritage structures, many built in the muscular Chicago style.

And still, the Exchange is underused and often underappreciated.

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Brent Bell’s work involves shelters for the homeless.

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Brock Klassen’s re­imagining of the E-Children build­ing.

The District's crowded past and imagined future come together in this intelligent, exploratory new exhibition, which features work by nine second-year students from the faculty of architecture at the University of Manitoba.

This is a student show in the best sense: it combines a giddy sense of possibility with an earnest faith in the power of architecture to engage and inform. And it opens up the Exchange District -- sometimes literally -- to give viewers a fresh sense of the area's possibilities.

The exhibition's "what if" scenarios started with the students walking and talking in the neighbourhood, pounding the pavement and getting stories from the people who work and live there. The students' journeys are mapped out in a vertical maze of coloured strings.

The students then took existing buildings and transformed them, in architectural drawings and in scale models that combine photographic surfaces of existing façades with speculative add-ons. Instead of placing the models on tables, a standard practice that gives viewers a distanced, omniscient perspective, the show's organizer, instructor Liane Veness, hangs the structures in mid-air. Viewers can peek in windows and peer through doors, getting an intimate sense of all the canny little balsawood details.

Some students have chosen to sift through layers of history. Amanda Hamilton excavates stories of printing presses and pioneering photography studios, rumours of Louis Riel and hidden jail cells. (And who knew the Woodbine Hotel once had a two-lane bowling alley in its basement?)

Some explore their buildings' mysterious upper levels, which are largely invisible to street-level observation. Evan Burgess uses mirrors to suggest alternate realities concealed in an old warehouse building.

Some reclaim overlooked, underused spaces. Tiffany Leong re-envisions the ominous tunnel between Arthur and Albert streets -- now largely used as the setting for crime scenes in Winnipeg Film Group shorts -- as a seamstress's shop, neat, beautiful and useful.

Other students tackle social issues. Brent Bell bumps out a building's wall to form wooden shelters for homeless people. Brock Klassen mixes up public and private spaces by offering community showers and baths in the E-Children building on Princess Street.

The show also includes narratives, a potent reminder that the architecture of the Exchange District isn't just about structures. It's about interaction, about people relating to their surroundings and to each other.

Incidentally, the RAW Gallery, which opened just last month and showcases work on architecture and design, is itself an example of the neighbourhood's potential. Situated in a reclaimed basement in the Glengarry Building, the gallery aims to connect architects with a wider audience, reinforcing the idea that architecture isn't some rarefied add-on but a vital, integral part of our city and our lives.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Art review

A Fictional Exchange: a group show by students from the Faculty of Architecture

RAW Gallery, 290 McDermot Ave.,

Until May 31

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 13, 2010 D3