FORMER Winnipeg architect Ron Keenberg has no shortage of controversial opinions about his hometown:
Of the Bird Shack at Delta Marsh, Keenberg writes, ‘ The Bird Shack was my ode to conservation, my little marshland cathedral of delight. The idea began over scotch.’
The National Archives of Canada: Keenberg recalls, ‘ I wished this to be a place of architectural metaphors, full of firmness, commodity and delight. I wished it to defeat obsolescence, the “ villain” of modern architecture.
"Winnipeg was never been interested in having a visionary architect," says Keenberg, 64, who has been based in Ottawa since 1991.
"Sometimes I felt like Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel. I was always moving on. I didn't get much repeat business."
What he did get, though, was successful and rich. Moreover, he got the chance to practise what he calls "architecture with a capital A" -- much of it in Winnipeg, which he calls an "architectural desert."
Among Keenberg's most recognizable projects are the Deer Lodge Centre on Portage Avenue, the Earth Sciences Building at the University of Manitoba and the 1987 expansion of the Winnipeg International Airport.
He won Governor General's medals or awards for architecture four times in under 20 years, for the IKOY office building on Assiniboine Avenue, the Auto/Diesel Shop at Red River College, the Northwest Recreation Centre in Regina, and the Bird Shack at Delta Marsh. He won a fifth time in 2001 for his design of the National Archives of Canada in Gatineau, Que. No other Winnipeg architect has won the G-G medal even once.
Of Deer Lodge Centre, Keenberg writes, ‘ The restaurant is the loveliest in town, but the food is “ hospital”; I got carried away.’
"My detractors say my arrogance is misplaced," he says over the phone.
"They compare me unfavourably to (superstar architects) Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry and Richard Rogers. I love the company I'm not quite as good as."
Keenberg, who retired in 2004, has recorded an amusing and idiosyncratic version of his life and career in a new book, Sex, Violence and Architecture Vol. 1, that has just arrived in major Winnipeg bookstores.
The massive coffee-table tome, an architectural monograph like no other, does everything from record his professional philosophy to settle old scores. It also contains hundreds of colour images of the buildings he has designed.
Readers can judge for themselves whether this avatar of Prairie modernism has delusions of grandeur or if he is an under-appreciated genius.
"I'm going to be remembered as a famous Canadian architect after I'm dead," says Keenberg, who will be in Winnipeg to sign copies of the $75 book May 17 at McNally Robinson Grant Park.
"My work is classical. It has always stood the test of time. You can't date it by looking at it."
In 1968, he and three colleagues, Roy Izen, Stan Osaka and James Yamashita, hung out their architectural shingle as IKOY.
For the next 20 years the upstart firm prospered in a competitive environment. Keenberg became of one Canada's signature architects, known for his boldly coloured designs that were cost-effectively produced with off-the-shelf components.
Because Keenberg's undergraduate degree was in design (from New York's Pratt Institute), he was not accepted into the profession until he completed his master's degree in 1989 -- even though he had won three G-G medals and was a full adjunct professor in the architecture faculties at the universities of Manitoba and Waterloo.
Keenberg's abrasive personality and almost messianic sense of mission put him at odds with many of his clients. The majority of buildings in North America are terrible, Keenberg says, because architects cave into the demands of those paying the freight.
As he lists favourite projects from his career, including the Westboine Co-operative on Roblin Boulevard and the diesel shop at Red River College, he asks, "Do you see a trend?"
Almost everything he did in Winnipeg was on the periphery of the city, he concedes.
"They wouldn't trust me with a building downtown."
His major regret is not having tested himself against the best in a world capital.
"I don't know if I could have have been successful in New York or London," he says. "But there I would have been considered unassuming and modest."
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
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