Intention. Design Team

IKOY was founded in 1968 by Ron Keenberg. The firm’s work has generally centered on industrialized systems and the act of converting functional hardware components into dynamic works of architecture. In 1978, for example, the firm constructed its own two-story headquarters in down­town Winnipeg from prefabricated concrete and plug-in utilities in just 90 days. Perhaps as a consequence of this industrial focus, IKOY is best known for institutional, edu­cational, and industrial work, in which cost control and ease of construction are vital. As a well-published and fre­quently honored architectural firm, however, IKOY’s designs represent a respectable breadth of building types.

philosophy

When people walk through a building, they should feel it as a living thing. Our buildings have excited the public because people see the reality of the building displayed through the texture and kinetics of its mechanics and their delightful forms.

Ron Keenberg

IKOY describes its architectural practice as “high-tech humanist.” Its approach can also be defined through its process of design. A strong belief in industrialized system techniques has stimulated statements from IKOY on design method, systems selection, teamwork, and modes of construction:

• Architecture consists of basic systems rather than a “collection of details.”

• Engineering systems are architectural systems and are therefore “part of the original design concept.”

• Architects select systems. Engineers “proportion” them.

• Poor design substitutes expensive components for imagination.

• A building should outlive changes in its function.

^ Manual labor construction sites have become prefab­ricated-component “assembly sites.”

Intent

True to IKOY form, the Wallace Laboratory was intended and realized as an assemblage of industrial systems and an integrated set of dynamic working parts. Further, compo­nents systems and pieces were all required to be readily available from multiple suppliers so that no assembly would readily become obsolete. Most important, however, and what distinguishes the architectural quality of inten­tion here, the product was to have expressionistic character and meaning through articulation of what each part does.

Development of the brief and selection of the site led to the formal intention of making the building into a gate­way and providing a crucial linkup of the campus’s tunnel circulation system.