National Network for Equitable Library Service

Founded in 1913, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba was one of the earliest architecture programs in Canada. With a reputation for providing a solid Beaux-Arts education, and with the promotion of John A. Russell to the position of Dean, the school became a leader in North America for disseminating Modernist principles. Russell, an American trained at MIT, immediately began hiring first-rate faculty internationally, including James Donahue, who studied under Gropius at Harvard; Wolfgang Gerson, who trained in Bristol; and the Scottish Jim Christie. Russell also encouraged his students to do graduate work at top schools around the world, including working with London's Arup Associates--the firm responsible for the engineering of the Centre Georges Pompidou--and Mies van der Roche, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The direct influence of Mies in Winnipeg resulted in an extraordinarily large number of buildings that are characterized by a strict adherence to the Modernist principles of truth to material, structural expression, and purity of form.