Kendra Wile

Traces: A Process of Shaping and Re-Framing a City Identity

In this thesis, I will explore the physical and mental traces left behind by a long-forgotten city identity established in the early days of the Red River Settlement and how engaging with these historical traces left not only in the built environment but in the underlying fabric of the city, can add to the form, utility, and identity of Portage Avenue. 

This project will look at how Winnipeg buildings, streets, and public spaces collectively create a sense of place and belonging that is further reinforced by the people who live, work, and experience it. We can explore this relationship not only through memory but also through the marks the ever-evolving city landscape has made upon the clay soil it rises from.    

The contemporary urban fabric of Portage Avenue rolls closed as the office workers head home to the outlying suburbs, leaving the central core and emptying the downtown streets each day. Portage in the 21st century, feels as though it is fixed in a state of limbo, gone are the days of glitzy window displays and elaborate overhanging signs, inviting pedestrians to promenade down the sidewalk, wearing their finest outfits while they shopped for furs and local goods.¹ There is a sense of loss hanging in the air leaving this main downtown district in a situation hovering between then and now, grappling with an identity crisis of city proportions. 

This thesis intends to inform the design scheme for a proposal to relocate the City of Winnipeg Archives into a site along Portage Avenue that will celebrate the archive’s collection of city history and bring it into the heart of the downtown core, bringing these memories into an accessible public space that preserves the historicity of the street and its humble marks made through time. 

The proposal will focus on developing research on traditional tile vaults and building techniques, sourcing clay from the soil of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers to create not only building tiles but also acting as vessels of memory. The single tile encapsulated within the larger form draws comparisons to a single document housed within an archive, both working to form and fill the space it exists in. Tile vaulting is a building process that aims to become what it is meant to create, the vault form, the single document aims to be exactly what it was created for, a resource, a storyteller.

1. Russ Gourluck, Going Downtown: A History of Winnipeg’s Portage Avenue. (Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications, 2006), 4.