The canoe museums weathering steel faade is punctuated by a diagonal slice of glazing, offering glimpses of an atrium festooned with suspended canoes.PROJECT Canadian Canoe Museum, Peterborough, OntarioARCHITECT Unity Design Studio Inc.TEXT Javier ZellerPHOTOS Salina KassamThere are perhaps no material objects from this country more elegant than the canoe and the kayak, the jiimaan (Anishinaabemowin) and qajaq (Inuktitut) as they are known to Indigenous peoples. Their forms were already perfected before being adopted by Europeans as the self-evidently superior means of travelling across lakes and down rivers in this water-rich land. The Canadian Canoe Museum, in Peterborough, Ontario, is home to the worlds pre-eminent collection of these human-powered watercraft.Begun by private collector Kirk Wipper, the collection became formalized as a not-for-profit public museum in 1997. For several decades, the Canadian Canoe Museum languished in a nondescript former outboard motor factory in Peterborough. By 2010, efforts were underway to move to a waterside siteand a new building that reflected the cultural importance and global significance of this collection. In 2015, the Museum launched a two-stage competition, chaired by architectural writer Lisa Rochon, that selected Irelands heneghan peng architects in joint venture with Kearns Mancini Architects as designers for the new building (CA, May 2016). It was to be sited immediately adjacent to the Lift Lock National Historic Site on the Trent-Severn waterway, a necklace of interconnected rivers and lakes that permits boat travel between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay on Lake Huron.However, shortly before construction was slated to begin a few years later, the selected site was discovered to be contaminated with industrial solvents. Thisin combination with financial challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, led to the selection of a new site further south on the Trent-Severn and a new architect team, Unity Architects, one of the original competitions shortlisted finalists. Unity Architects, formerly Lett Architects, is a storied Peterborough firm, well-known for their thoughtful design work on cultural projects including The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery on Torontos waterfront, Victoria Colleges Isabel Bader Theatre and the (unfortunately repurposed and much missed) Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation. Their work is characterized by clear, unfussy, carefully detailed elegance.On the Canadian Canoe Museum project, Unity faced a challenging set of conditions: a constrained budget, a site different than the one they had initially designed for, and a compressed timeframe for construction. Unity nonetheless delivered a much better building than would have been expected in the circumstances they faced. With a restrained palette of materials and controlled spatial sequence, Unity Architects has created a place that connects the visitor to the artifacts through material and movement.The new building, fronting a broad bend in the Otonabee River called Little Lake, is set towards Ashburnham Drive, away from the rivers floodplain. The building presents a long, mostly mute, weathering steel faade to the road. These vertically oriented siding panels are well on their way to becoming fully patinated, and their warm orange colour provides a textured backdrop to the Museums trilingual signage, which incorporates a pictograph (mazinaawbikinigin) from the indigenous Fort William First Nation.The main stair spirals around a wood-slat-clad service core, offering visitors views of the collection archive, as well as varying vantage points to the canoes suspended in the main atrium.A full-height glazed volume marks the main entrance, held in a frame of prefinished metal and wood cladding. The curtainwall glazing of the two-storey entrance vestibule is fritted with a large-scale hydrological map showing the waterways of central Canada, from Hudsons Bay to the Great Lakes. This is the first of many references to wood, waterways and cultural historyunderstood especially through an Indigenous perspectivethat repeat through the experience of the Museum and the display of its collection. South of the entry, the buildings volume erodes away, and a faceted curve of weathering steel siding lifts, tilting above a broad triangle of curtainwall.The museums archive holds some 500 historic watercraft in a class-A, climate-controlled space.Inside, the building is a long bar composed of two double-storey levels. On the ground floor, two-thirds of the building houses the Museums archive: 500 watercraft cradled and stacked high on custom racks. Directly above this volume, the 1,850-square-metre exhibition space contains the approximately 100 vessels on display.South of the exhibition and archive hall, the public spaces of the museum are anchored by a 7.6-metre-tall entry hall, which includes a caf, gift shop, workshop and staff spaces. This open atrium is a glulam-framed mass timber structure, clad in cross-laminated timber panels.The atrium is capped by a three-storey hearth, flanked by glazing that overlooks the Otonabee River.Given the complex technical requirements involved in providing a class A archival climate-controlled space for the collection, Unity focused their design towards a strategic use of the remaining resources; the large-scale public entry hall and spiralling promenade to the exhibit hall on the second floor are especially successful. The entry halls timber frame and claddingparticularly at the southeast corner, where the curtainwall glazing displaces the spruce CLT panels, exposing the Douglas fir glulam structure as a frameis an elegant echo of the frame-and-birch construction of many of the canoes and kayaks in the collection. An acoustic ceiling with white oak wood slats helps control sound and keep the space intimate, and the wood material palette evokes a gathering lodge. Along the west faade of the entry hall, a three-storey hearth is flanked with glazing that overlooks the Otonabee River and Little Lake. A two-sided dry-laid stone chimney anchors the buildings south-west corner. The warmly appointed space was being well enjoyed on the wintery day I visited.The wood-clad service core is shaped like a boulder in a river.To access the exhibition space, visitors ascend a stair that spirals around a three-storey stack of wood-slat-clad service spaces and washrooms, shaped like a lozenge or a boulder in a river. This journey provides an overlook into the collection archive at different heights, as well as views of the entry hall, with its ceiling-suspended canoes and kayaks. You pass alongside them, see them from below and then from above, always moving alongside a wood surface and grasping a wood handrail that provides a direct physical connection to the material world of this collection.The second-floor exhibition area includes a display of some 100 canoes and kayaks.In addition to the main exhibit hall, the second floor contains a multipurpose space and library. The exhibit hall is a black-box space under the buildings asymmetrical gable roof, entered through the threshold of a simple millwork frame. Its worth mentioning that while exhibitions can sometimes come across as diffuse or sparse in these types of large-scale black painted volumes, the Canadian Canoe Museums exhibition design, by Montreals GSM, is extremely well arranged. Another hydrological mapthis time of North America, where Canada appears like a vast sponge with spidery rivers and myriad lakesanchors the hall under a spiral of suspended canoes and kayaks. Watercraft are displayed along with a mix of video, audio, and interactive componentsall with a welcome emphasis on Indigenous voices and perspectives. The elegance of the objects themselves is undeniable, and the skill of their makers is evident and remarkable.At the rear of the museum, a secondary building holds 50 canoes, near to two fully accessible docks. Part of the museums programming allows visitors firsthand experience of paddling a canoe or kayak.While my winter visit meant arrival by car, a network of interconnected parks and a riverside section of the Trans Canada Trail give an unusual prominence to the buildings river face, which Bill Lett and Michael Gallant from Unity describe as the buildings true front door in the summer months. A smaller volume on the river holds 50 canoes at the waterside, along with two fully accessible docks. For the first time in its history, the museum has an onsite facility where visitors can get firsthand experience of paddling a canoe or kayak.Perhaps the most successful attribute of Unity Architects design for the Canadian Canoe Museum is their distillation of the artefacts, the canoes and kayaks, into the experience of the museum itself. Their subtle evocation of form, craft, and movement is carefully considered and achieved without superfluous gestures. The building embodies the elegant logic of its collection and provides a fitting new home for these foundational objects of Canadian culture.Javier Zeller, MRAIC, is an architect working in Toronto with Diamond Schmitt Architects.CLIENT CANADIAN CANOE MUSEUM | ARCHITECT TEAM BILL LETT, MICHAEL GALLANT, MATTHEW PHILIP, IAN MCGEE, MITCH COSSITT, NATHAN PASZT, AMANDA MOTYER, LOGAN BRAZEAU, SCOTT DONOVAN, SCOTT PATTERSON | STRUCTURAL DESIGN ENGINEER PARTNER LEA CONSULTING | MECHANICAL DESIGN AND TRADE PARTNER KELSON | ELECTRICAL DESIGN ENGINEER PARTNER D.G. BIDDLE AND ASSOCIATES | ELECTRICAL DESIGN TRADE PARTNER LANCER ELECTRIC | LANDSCAPE BASTERFIELD AND ASSOCIATES | CIVIL ENGAGE ENGENERING | CONTRACTOR CHANDOS CONSTRUCTION | CONSERVATION JHG CONSULTING | AREA 6,039 M2 | BUDGET $34.1 M | COMPLETION MAY 2024As appeared in theApril 2025issue of Canadian Architect magazineThe post Canadian Classic: Canadian Canoe Museum, Peterborough, Ontario appeared first on Canadian Architect.