Dennis H. Carter

During his studies, Carter worked several months for Cowin and Co. Reinforced Concrete Engineers, and after graduation spent two years with Moody Moore Architects.[11]

In June 1947 Carter registered with the Manitoba Association of Architects, and, the same year, the business partnership Smith Carter Katelnikoff was formed,[11] with offices on 289½ Garry Street.[13] The company went through a number of name and partner changes[14] and eventually became known simply as Smith Carter Partners and later Smith Carter Architects and Engineers, Smith always serving as the managing partner until his retirement in 1985.[8]

Smith Carter Katelnikoff made their name locally with the 1948 renovation of their own offices on Portage Avenue East and, due to the demand created by Winnipeg's expanding population in the 1950s,[15][note 1] several schools.[note 2] At the same time, the firm grew on the strength of commissions for large schools in rural Manitoba and Western Canada where modern centralized facilities were replacing one-room schools.[9]

During the 1950s, as the firm's commissions grew, attention was increasingly paid to interior functions and appropriate materials, advocating a modernism adapted "to express local climatic and cultural circumstances."[11] Carter emphasized that the client's desires be respected (as recalled by his daughter Shelagh):

You have got to represent the client and you have got to listen to what they want... You don't put you on them, you know; you can problem solve and hope to aesthetically educate them if you feel they are going a little, you know, not quite. It wasn't supposed to be a Dennis Carter Building... you serve the client. He really imparted to me that it was about the work and not about his ego.[7]

View of Rainbow Stage, Canada's longest running outdoor theatre, in winter

Laminated timber arch replica of original roof support of Rainbow Stage in Kildonan Park

Following the Manitoba flood of 1950, the bandstand in Kildonan Park was damaged and it was decided to replace it with a structure suitable for use as an open-air theatre, inspired by the Theatre Under the Stars in Vancouver.[17] The firm designed what has turned out to be Canada's longest running venue for outdoor theatre, Rainbow Stage (1951–1953), the name itself suggested by the cardboard model of the design Carter brought with him to a meeting one night, someone having observed that if lights were strung along the top curvature, "it would look like a rainbow."[17]

When initially completed, the structure consisted of a covered stage and dressing rooms with very little in the way of backstage area or wings, but featuring a brightly-lit rainbow of laminated wood arched over the stage before an amphitheatre with a slab floor in the centre and wooden benches.[18] Finished in time for the first performance in September 1953, pergola walkways were constructed on either side of the amphitheatre along with seats and complimentary landscaping the following spring and summer, when Rainbow Stage officially opened on 7 July 1954.[17][18]

An example of Carter's philosophy is his approach to the design of Hamber Hall, a 1956 addition to St. John's-Ravenscourt School: he consulted at length with students, parents, and teachers to gather their opinions.[19] His design incorporated classrooms, an infirmary, offices, an art and film room, living quarters, and a dining hall which was celebrated in local media for his imaginative use of space; it was equipped with a large fireplace and a wall with a brick panel surrounded by glass, combining traditional and modernist ideas.[19]

Carter took particular pride in his contribution to the design of the new Rae & Jerry's Steak House (1957),[11][20] which has been described as the "epitome of North American mid-century, modernist high-end restaurant design".[21] According to Kelly Crossman, the finished building was up-to-date and stylish, offering Winnipeggers the kind of space seen in films like Alfred Hitchcock's thriller North by Northwest, in magazines, or on vacations in New York or southern California.[22] By this time, Carter had acquired an 8mm camera and filmed the large steam shovels arriving at the site to excavate the foundation.[7] The current structure, "something like a time-capsule",[21] remains almost entirely as it was when built, down to the "luxurious dark wood" and red leatherette Bauhaus-inspired chairs.[7][note 3]

The design and construction of the University of Manitoba's School of Architecture (1958–1959) was a benchmark for Smith Carter, considered "a paradigmatic example of 1950s institutional architecture".[11][note 4] The project won the firm a Massey Medal.[13]

The Monarch Life Building (1959–1963; since 1999, the Workers Compensation Board of Manitoba Building) described as a "paragon of modernist order and dignity" on the Winnipeg Architectural Foundation website, was a finalist for the Massey Medal in 1964.[13] The design team, led by Carter, sought to express "the bold confidence and security of the corporation, its concern for its clients and employees, as well as its commitment to the economic development of the city of Winnipeg."[23] The structure itself is composed of a central four-storey section largely ensconced in masonry atop an open, glazed ground level, all surmounted by another open, glazed top floor.[13][note 5] Conscious of the clients' interest in corporate image, bleachers were constructed to allow spectators to watch comfortably the progress of construction and a sectional mockup of the façade was installed for testing and for public viewing.[23] According to Susan Algie, executive director of the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation, Carter documented the construction of his project with his 8mm camera "from shovel in ground right through to opening day".[7]

Throughout the 1960s the City of Winnipeg conducted transport studies which led to a rethinking of traffic flow through Portage Avenue and Main Street, the city's hub. The City had Smith Carter conduct the transit forecast studies and concluded that mixing pedestrian and vehicular traffic would no longer be viable, ultimately leading to the construction of an underground concourse replacing the four sidewalks of the corner.[24]

Cluster of buildings in Downtown Winnipeg near Portage and Main, from left to right: Commodity Exchange Tower, Grain Commission (centre) and Richardson buildings.

Significant or large scale works during this period include the Canadian Wheat Board addition,[25] the Grain Commission (1962-1963 and 1970, respectively), the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Canada buildings (1965 and 1971), the Pan Am Pool (1967), and the Manitoba Centennial Centre (1967–1972).[note 6] One of the firm's most identifiable works from the period, and "one of the most identifiable landmarks of the city" is the Richardson Building[7] (1967–1969; with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill as consulting architects),[26] which Carter's daughter Shelagh asserts began as a sketch of a tower by her father after a talk with James Richardson, during a visit with the Carters at the family cabin. The building still serves as the headquarters of Richardson International. The 34-storey building stands 124 metres tall, then the tallest building in Winnipeg (currently the second-tallest). It is dressed in granite chip pre-cast concrete and solar bronze double-glazed glass.[27] The Richardson building forms the anchor of the Lombard Place development, which includes the Winnipeg Inn (1970, currently the Fairmont Hotel) and the underground concourse later connected to Trizec's Winnipeg Square shopping mall (1979)[26] and the Commodity Exchange Tower (1974-1979, often referred to as the "Trizec Building" locally).[28] Such large scale projects, along with the Woodsworth Building on Broadway (1973), The Great-West Life Assurance Company (1983), and the Air Canada building (1985), changed the urban character of Winnipeg.[8]

Carter "cared greatly" about improving health care facilities "as a professional and citizen."[11] He was committed to the development of hospitals, such as Concordia, Seven Oaks, and the Grace,[note 7] which provided the springboard for the firm's involvement in research laboratory design,[1] such as a radiation therapy and cancer research centre at the Manitoba Medical Centre (1961, now Health Sciences Centre),[29] and, in the 1990s and later, high containment laboratories[1] (see below).

In 1963, Carter was made a Fellow of the RAIC, and served as president of the Manitoba Association of Architects in 1966 and 1967.[11] For a few years during this period (1969 to 1971), Smith Carter merged with Parkin Architects, thereby becoming, briefly, "the largest architectural and engineering concern in the country and the tenth largest in the world."[30]

Outside of Western Canada, the firm's projects included the entrance to Expo 67, Place d'Accueil, in Montreal, and abroad, the Canadian Embassy in Moscow and the Canadian Chancery in Warsaw[8] (about 1965; all but foundations demolished in 2001).[31]

Following Smith's retirement in 1985,[8] Smith Carter's reach extended to higher-level biomedical research facilities. Early examples included the St. Boniface Hospital Research Centre (1986–1987) and the John Buhler Research Centre at the Health Sciences Centre (about 1990), culminating in the firm's "seminal" project, the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health (1992–1998),[32] one of only two Level 4 laboratories in Canada,[33] establishing the firm as a leader in the design of highly secure laboratory facilities for disease research.[32]

Alongside Smith, Carter was awarded an honourary life membership to the Manitoba Association of Architects in 2000.[11]

Over the course of his career, Carter also served for many years as a studio critic at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture.[11]

Carter was an enthusiastic amateur filmmaker, shooting and editing "reels and reels" of film on an 8mm camera, most of it now part of the Dennis Carter Collection.[7] According to Susan Algie, few other architects were documenting construction projects on film. "People got those movie cameras to document their families predominantly, but Dennis Carter documented all kinds of things... At the time it was very innovative. He was really keen on the whole thing. We have the manual for the projector and the films and so on."[7] Marieke Gruwel screened every moment of film: "On some reels you will have a birthday party and then a building and then something else because he was turning the camera on and off". Films include construction projects and various openings.[7]

A Tiger Moth

Carter returned to his student interest in performance as president of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet from 1961 to 1964,[11] where his brother Leslie was also a dancer in the corps and ultimately a principal dancer.[12]

Carter was engaged in such organizations as the Winnipeg Flying Club (he attended a flight school in Great Britain),[7] the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada (a founding member), the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba and the Zoological Society of Manitoba.[11] Carter and three friends purchased a Vickers Viscount in July 1975 for preservation at the Aviation Museum.[34] After his retirement, Carter built model planes and helped to restore the museum's Tiger Moth heritage airplane,[11] a completely working aircraft that Carter and a group of volunteers flew across western Canada and the United States.[1]

Twelve boxes of materials were given to the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation a few years after Carter's death, of which there were about 100 reels of above-mentioned 8mm film capturing Winnipeg's 1950s and 1960s "resurgence" along with a variety of other films and travel documentation: "one of the most revealing architectural collections perhaps anywhere."[7] The collection includes many Winnipeg streetscapes but not Carter himself, who operated the camera.[7] Carter also filmed when he and his wife Barbara travelled abroad; the collection therefore includes scenes of international cities such as London and New York from the point of view of an architect, as Susan Algie remarks: "So you have those cities before they got so radically changed, and the neon… they were always looking at other architectural projects and doing research."[7]

Also digitized were boxes of paper materials including correspondence, including a letter of correspondence between Carter and Princess Grace of Monaco, building plans, travel agendas, six scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about Smith Carter, invites to building openings, a collection of hand drawn cartoons involving the firm, notes, dinner and party invitations, and more.[7]

As of 2017, the Dennis Carter collection was at the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation being researched and archived, as yet not accessible to the public, and did not yet have a permanent home, the arrangement at the Foundation being a temporary one; some of it was expected to go to the Aviation Museum.[7] As of mid 2019, most of the material remains at the Foundation.[35]

Carter designed the modernist Winnipeg home on 544 South Drive, built in 1957,[36] where he and his wife Barbara (married on 5 June 1948) raised two children, Richard and Shelagh,[1] who relates that the same dark wood used at Rae & Jerry's was also chosen by her father for the interior of the family home.[7] Living on the same street were several colleagues such as Roy Sellors, Allan Waisman, and Carter's former partner Walter Katelnikoff as well as John A. Russell.[15]

Richardson Building

Carter would sometimes edit his 8mm films while a very young Shelagh sat at the dining room table, and she recalled that when Carter flew on business trips with Barbara, he would often film the takeoff: "I remember my Mom and he would travel to Boston or Minneapolis and places like that and Dad would often be filming from the plane as it took off."[7] Family vacations were spent on Panorama Island at the Lake of the Woods.[1] Shelagh also recalled James Richardson visiting her father at the lake, and talking to her father about his dream for Portage and Main:

I remember they started to talk and my Dad had a napkin and he drew a tower. … he had started there on a table at the lake… shortly after that, I guess I was 11, Dad took the family to New York because Mr. Richardson was looking to decide who had done a skyscraper and who would understand the best way to go about this … They went to a meeting at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and I guess there was a meeting of the minds there. After that was the start of the Richardson Tower and the thought of Portage and Main.[7]

When both children were still young, Barbara began to show signs of some form of mental illness, the nature of which is unclear: "Terms were thrown around, schizophrenic, manic-depressive. People today would say bipolar..."[37] Shelagh recalled the first time she saw how her mother "broke down", "pounding on the floor", when she was nine years old.[37] Carter was often at a loss when it came to Barbara's moods, not knowing what to do; Shelagh became a "daddy's girl": "He thought he was being a great dad, but it set up this competition. What would happen is everything my mum would attempt would never get finished. But I was drawing and winning these prizes at school but it seemed if I showed her something, she would dismiss it."[37][note 8] By the mid 1990s, Barbara's mental health had become "much better" and the Carters "had some good time together."[37]

Dennis Carter died on 21 June 2012 at the Deer Lodge Centre, predeceased by Barbara[1] and his brother Leslie.[12]