Twenty + Change: AtLRG Architecture
AtLRG’s founders are candid about their origin story: the Winnipeg-based firm was born of a mid-life/mid-career reckoning with time. Colleagues and friends Chris Wiebe, Brian Pearson, and Sean Radford were all turning 40. They’d studied together at the University of Manitoba, and had worked for well over a decade in the profession. “Over the years, we had talked about maybe starting up a firm,” Wiebe muses. “There’s something about turning 40 that encourages you to ask: if not now, then when?”
The trio had amassed plenty of experience in sectors like multi-family housing and mixed use, and were sufficiently well known within Winnipeg’s compact design community that they were able to build a book of business quickly.
While Winnipeg remains a sprawl-oriented city, the market for modest intensification/infill in older core areas, like the Exchange District, has provided AtLRG with appealing opportunities, such as the conversion of the upper floors of a 1970s office building on Main into residential units.
The house specialty is contending with trickier downtown sites. The firm quickly built a reputation for taking on difficult infill projects—bringing a clear method and simplicity to the designs that made them viable.
A 10-storey Exchange district project, with 112,000 square feet of residential, retail, and office, as well as minimal underground parking, is a prime example of how AtLRG is advancing design that allows intensification while fitting into the historic character of the area. The typical tower-on-podium typology has been tweaked so that the base fits into the brick-and-beam form of the street. Meanwhile, the tower is configured as a parallelogram, oriented away from the street grid to address the Red River.
AtLRG had to work through the City’s regulations around conservation and density. “It was a very economically challenged project because of all these constraints,” says Wiebe. “I think we ended up with a design that is respectful to the heritage component of the context, but that also delivered the necessary tower that pays for the podium.” (The project, by Alston Properties and Concord Projects, is expected to open next year.)
AtLRG has also set its sights on winning more public sector commissions, and is currently working on an addition to the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture building.
As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine
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