
A Heritage Building To Call Home
As Canada fights valiantly to jack up its missing middle-density housing stock, the country’s heritage buildings are getting second lives. In Winnipeg, the conversion of the James Avenue Pumping Station has been decades in the making. It was first built in 1906 to supply the city’s hydrants with water drawn from the Red River. After it was decommissioned in 1986, however, it sat idle, scaring off developers with its foundation’s questionable integrity.

Finally, in 2016, after 17 false starts, it was revived by the architects at 5468796, whose flashlights illuminated a game-changing feature on an early tour of the boarded-up facility. Two gantry cranes, once able to drag 20,000 pounds worth of machinery to and fro, could be repurposed to support a second floor. By 2019, the pumping station’s mixed-use makeover was under way. On the blueprint? Office and commercial space, plus two six-storey housing blocks on the leftover slivers of land.
First, 5468796 used the rails of the gantry cranes to install a 12,000-square-foot office floor above the original machinery in the building’s central hall. (It’s now occupied by a software company.) Then, in 2021, another firm, Arccadd, set to work on James Avenue Pumphouse, a ground-level restaurant, with views of the exposed pumps and on-the-nose decor, like vintage hose carts.

The building’s residential bookends—two apartment buildings, totalling 93 units—were completed in 2024. Sasa Radulovic, 5468796’s co-founder, says the interior design was intentionally no-frills, one that “could be built by guys hired off Kijiji.” The units are filled with materials that can be bought at Home Depot. (No imported Sicilian marble here.)
The exterior is all wood and inexpensive corrugated metal, now something of a signature material in a city where construction costs run high. The entrance-and-exit system is more complex. In place of hermetically sealed indoor hallways, residents enter and exit via a maze of elevated outdoor walkways and footbridges connected to the old pumphouse. As a result, everyone gets their own de facto porch and chunky windows on both sides. They’re also well within shouting distance of pedestrians, a setup Radulovic compares to La Rambla, a bustling strip in Barcelona.

The current site is a far cry from the industrial black hole it once was. A new glass-wrapped hair salon, a café and a covered amphitheatre (jam-packed during Winnipeg’s Fringe Theatre Festival) have drawn plenty of foot traffic. The only true past-life leftover is the charming brick exterior, yellowing even more with time.