Heneghan peng create a splash

• Winter 2015
  Volume 32, Issue 4

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Heneghan peng has won yet another commission underscoring their ability to respond to a variety of terrains and their empathy with other cultures.

Heneghan peng architects and Kearns Mancini Architects (Toronto, Ontario) have won an international competition for the new €30 million Canadian Canoe Museum.

The design is an organically-shaped curved glass pavilion which will wind along the bank of the Trent-Severn canal in Peterborough, Ontario. The museum will have a two-acre rooftop garden and inside, a flexible floor plate which can be reconfigured depending on the Museum’s changing requirements.

The Museum will be embedded in drumlins on the bank of the canal providing naturally dark, energy-passive spaces for the light-sensitive collections of historic birch bark canoes and aboriginal artifacts. The jury was also impressed by the sustainability of the project, with geothermal heating and cooling and reduced energy costs.

According to Lisa Rochon, the Chair of the Selection Committee and Senior Fellow at the Global Cities Institute, University of Toronto, the jury found that heneghan peng’s design exemplified “the lightness and sublime functionality of the canoe. The museum design breaks with ego-driven architecture to offer a gentle, organic space that poetically winds its way along the Trent-Severn. It’s going to change the way we think about architecture, place making and the canoe – a true icon of design.”

For more on heneghan peng see Taking in the big picture, Irish Arts Review, Summer 2015, p257, The eye has to travel, Summer 2014, p78 and Elemental by design, Autumn 2012, p124.