At minus 37 degrees Celsius (that’s minus 35 Fahrenheit) on a cloudless February morning, most of Winnipeg, Manitoba, was quiet. But I wasn’t the only one who was defiantly laced into ice skates. Out on the Assiniboine River, commuters, dog walkers, stroller pushers, hockey players and general dawdlers were gliding along a smooth band of ice, steam clouds drifting from behind their scarves with every aerobic side-to-side stride. One couple succumbed to the cold, wrapping themselves in curtainlike wool blankets that were suspended from a bridge like a massive Hudson Bay comforter, which was precisely their purpose.
“Red Blanket,” designed by Toronto-based Workshop Architecture was one of 17 loosely termed “warming huts” stationed last year along Winnipeg’s Red River Mutual Trail, a four-mile trail that covers the intersecting Assiniboine and Red Rivers that meet in an area known as the Forks. Annually, the trail is plowed, groomed and Zamboni-ed into one of the longest skating trails in Canada, and perhaps its most distinctive, as it is dotted with architect-designed warming huts.
Forget customary cabins with roaring fireplaces or heat-belching furnaces. These huts more closely resemble art installations, and many, including my favorite, “Wind Catcher,” a Caribbean blue open-sided box with an orange wind funnel within, aren’t even warm. Six years ago, Peter Hargraves, a principal at Winnipeg-based Sputnik Architecture, was co-founder of an architectural contest to build inventive huts along the river rink.
“The project was selfish initially,” Mr. Hargraves said one afternoon last February as we skated the trail together. Without warming huts, he said, he’d be freezing before he finished tying the skate laces for his three children. Once he determined the city needed warming huts, the architect saw a unique opportunity.
“This is Winnipeg. We’re a winter city,” he said. “I thought, let’s enhance it.”
He created an architectural competition that has grown in the past six years from a local novelty to a global attraction. Designers from students to big-name architects have submitted entries, including Frank Gehry, whose 2012 contribution featured an igloo made of clear blocks of ice.
This year’s three winners, announced in November, drew from over 100 entries worldwide and include a shelter and two art installations. “The Hole Idea,” from Toronto-based Weiss Architecture & Urbanism, provides refuge in a 35-foot-long, 10-foot-diameter snow tunnel to be built in a riverside snowbank. Art installation winners include “This Big,” an ice sculpture of an enormous fish emerging from the frozen river from Dorebak Akershus in Norway. “Recycling Words” from Montreal-based Kanva Architecture stations 50 repurposed chairs, each bolted to recycled skis, along the trail. Stenciled with words like “flow” and “trade,” the portable chairs will serve resting skaters and can be rearranged to create phrases.
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Invited entries (those solicited but not judged) in the class of 2015 include the “Hybrid Hut,” an arching, ring-shaped shelter covered in recycled timber from Rojkind Arquitectos of Mexico City. Students from the University of Manitoba produced “Mirror Cloaking,” a box sided in one-way mirrors. Built in Winnipeg on 8-by-12-foot skids, the huts are hauled out onto the ice once it’s deemed solid enough, usually in January, and remain until the spring thaw, usually early March. The annual newcomers are erected along with some of the greatest hits from years past, including an overturned-canoe-shaped hut covered in pine boughs called “Fir Hut,” from the Nova Scotia architect Richard Kroeker. This year a total of 20 warming huts will be posted along the skating trail.
To tour the collection, as I did last winter, is akin to visiting an interactive sculpture garden on blades (the retail development at the rivers’ intersection, also known as the Forks, offers rental skates for 5 Canadian dollars, $4.45 at 1.12 Canadian dollars to the U.S. dollar). At “Hygge House,” a three-sided cabin in which interiors, exteriors and furnishings are painted neon green, I rested in a rocking chair next to a nonfunctioning stove and admired the taxidermy duck on the wall. At “Apparition,” designed by the Albuquerque-based architect Antoine Predock, who also did the city’s new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, I climbed into a snowbound metal cave. I couldn’t resist a selfie in the student-designed ceilingless “Skybox,” paneled in reflective materials from the University of Manitoba. (“Red Blanket,” “Fir Hut,” “Hygge House,” “Wind Catcher” and “Apparition” are again part of this year’s lineup).
The river route winds from the touristy Forks area out to residential neighborhoods. Beaten paths in the snow indicate access routes used by locals, who change into their skates at the warming huts, proving their practical purpose.
“We started installing the huts along the skating trail so you didn’t have to come to the Forks to access the river, but could go directly to the trail,” Mr. Hargraves said. “Effectively, it’s turned the river into a park. Before you mostly stayed off the river. You’d clear a rink, but with trepidation.”
Now the Forks center has taken on trail maintenance, including sending a Zamboni out daily to resurface the ice, and patching crews to fill holes. The result is one of the smoothest outdoor rinks I’ve experienced in a lifetime of shoveling them in northern Michigan. Now, over 20,000 people visit the Forks on winter Saturdays, though on weekdays, when I visited, there was plenty of room to race.
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The popularity of the warming huts has inspired more pop-ups on the river, especially RAW:Almond, a restaurant built on the ice under a tarp-covered metal structure. (This year’s rendition is slightly more stylized; the pop-up held its own design competition for the structure.) For three weeks in late January and early February, the restaurant offers three dinner seatings nightly at its enormous 30-seat center table. I took a hide-covered tree-trunk stool at the table one night between two CBC radio broadcasters and a pair of doctors for a five-course meal overseen by Raw:Almond’s culinary mastermind, the chef Mandel Hitzer, who runs a restaurant called Deer + Almond on Winnipeg’s terra firma.
“The Forks has always been a meeting place,” said the chef, addressing diners before servers brought out the first course, tuna sashimi with shiso vinaigrette. “Over the centuries our city was built on these riverbanks. This is a way to sit on these frozen waters comfortably.”
Like Ice Capades for foodies, waiters and chefs slide around the ice dining room in rubber boots as they come and go with plates of food. Diners keep their parkas zipped and their stocking caps stuck firmly on their heads as they dig into shoyu-marinated duck breast and foie gras.
“Manitoba is so cold you have to do something to get people out of their homes,” said Thomas Fudge, a Winnipeg medical student who, with his wife, Jessica, dined next to me at the communal table. “We’re sitting on a chunk of ice in middle of river, and we’re happy about it.”
“Our winter is about building community,” Mr. Hitzer said, as I poked my head into the makeshift kitchen, its plywood walls graffitied in notes of appreciation including, “Thank you for making my winter a special event.”