New stone-cladding woes, another big building fix

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This article was published 19/01/2011 (5483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Another stone-clad Winnipeg building is getting a multimillion-dollar facelift to prevent its facade from crumbling away.

The black granite on the exterior of the 51-year-old Workers Compensation Board building on Broadway is being re-affixed to the building’s steel frame as part of an effort to fix a problem common to other modernist structures of its vintage.

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the architects who designed some of the city’s best-known modernist buildings were not aware of the effect freeze-thaw cycles would have on the stone cladding.

Over the course of decades, water and ice have gotten behind the stones on the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Public Safety Building, the Winnipeg Convention Centre and the Centennial Concert Hall, cracking or rusting away the braces that hold the stones in place.

The art gallery and concert hall were repaired, while the rising tab for re-cladding the PSB led the Winnipeg Police Service to decide to move out of its Princess Street headquarters.

The Winnipeg Convention Centre, meanwhile, chose to replace its stone cladding with a lighter, cheaper metal alloy. That wasn’t an option for the Workers Compensation Board, which is considered one of the city’s most important buildings mainly because of its granite facade.

“This is probably the finest example of 1960s modernist architecture in Manitoba and in my opinion, all of Canada,” said Doug Corbett of Smith Carter, the designing architect on a reconstruction project pegged at $7.5 million to $8.5 million, including the tab for updating the windows and installing a new air barrier system to prevent future problems with the stone veneer. “Our design intent is to not alter the look from the exterior.”

The quantity of stone that must be replaced will determine the precise project cost, said Warren Preece, spokesman for the Workers Compensation Board. Some new panels may be needed.

“A lot depends on what we find the condition of the granite to be,” he said, noting the Crown corporation is committed to maintaining the original appearance.

The six-storey structure at 333 Broadway was completed in 1960 at a cost of $4 million. It made use of 1,300 tons of granite, said Preece, quoting a decades-old story in an architectural magazine.

“Building-envelope technology has evolved since these (modernist structures) were built in the 1960s,” he said. “They didn’t know what happens when water gets behind there.”

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca