John Nugent Studio

Shortly after his arrival in Lumsden in 1948, Montreal-born sculptor and chandler John Nugent established a studio and a bronze casting foundry on a 2.7-hectare parcel of land that forms the north slope of the Qu’Appelle Valley.[2][3] In 1960, Nugent's candle works burned down and he asked Wiens to design a new studio.[4]

Wiens had previously designed Regina Five artist Kenneth Lochhead's Balgonie studio, a "slant-roofed, sky-lighted modernist building" on the site of an old blacksmith's shop behind Lochhead's house.[5]

The provocative form of the studio was inspired by the modernist concrete tensile shell structures of Mexican architect Felix Candela.[2]

The building represents the combination of a structural and architectural idea that resulted in a provocative form integrated with the landscape, a design philosophy that Clifford Wiens calls "total focus".[2] Good design, according to Wiens, encompasses the entirety of the building's setting, reflecting his lifelong approach to make architecture "organic to its setting" and buildings "growing out of the ground like a tree," as exemplified by the half-subterranean Studio.[6]

Wiens designed the studio utilizing various types of concrete construction.[7] The conical-shaped roof of the central section was constructed from pre-tensioned, thin-shell concrete, while sections of concrete culverts were used for the window openings, illustrating the combination of manufactured elements with crafted elements characterizing the overall nature of the structure.[2] The flat roof of the lower section is composed of pre-cast concrete sections in-filled with concrete during construction "to allow the roof to negotiate the fan-shaped plan-form."[2]

Over the course of a single year, the studio was constructed over successive weekends by Nugent and Wiens, with help from Lochhead and Roy Kiyooka.[2]

John Nugent opened his studio under the name "St. Mark's Shop".[7] Over the course of the next thirty years or so of his career, he produced abstract welded metal sculpture, metal castings, religious artifacts, works in silver, as well as candlemaking,[2] shifting his focus to photography in the 1990s.[4][8] In 2005, the Shop became a nationally recognized Canandian cultural heritage site.[2]

According to a provincial government guide to heritage properties, the primary architectural significance of the Studio is its "innovative design which integrates the building with its surrounding landscape", the roof of the foundry in particular, which is "structurally unique".[10] While modest in budget, the Studio was intellectually ambitious: the conical roof's construction from thin-shell reinforced concrete was an advanced technique reflecting international influences, according to Alex Bozikovic, who sees the Studio as an example of how the architect's work was part of "a continuing conversation with artists and makers".[11]

Bernard Flaman finds the Studio and other significant works by Wiens in the Sixities "delight the senses with their authenticity, and defy photographic documentation."[9] Flaman identifies similarities among such diverse works as the Heating and Cooling Plant, the Silton Chapel, and the Nugent Studio despite their "radically different" purposes and being formally and materially unique, exhibiting "strong, simple forms" and "ignoring modernism's dogmatic side and the dictum of flat roofs".[9] All three find ways of filtering "the strong prairie sunlight" and establish "a delicate relationship with the landscape."

Most striking, however, is the way each building springs from the combination of a structural and an architectural idea, beginning with a close analysis of tension and compression elements that are resolved with architectural details of startling invention.[9]

For the studio's inventive curved and conical design, Wiens received a Massey silver medal in 1967 from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.[4][2]

The John Nugent Studio has been a Provincial Heritage Property since 26 May 2005,[2] the 42nd site so designated, and listed at the online Canadian Register of Historic Places.[12] The register entry enumerates a number of elements at the site which define or enhance the heritage value of the Studio in terms of its archiecture and its use and associations.

Elements considered to be "character-defining" illustrative of the Studio's innovations include the conical foundry roof "floating on a lattice of reinforcing bars," the earthbound nature of the foundry itself and its interior fieldstones, the culvert sections used as window openings, and the combination of craft and manufactured concrete elements forming the roof of the lower section.[2] An element illustrative of the building's integration with the landscape is its placement on a bench of land overlooking the Qu'Appelle Valley.[2]

The building's association with John Nugent is considered just as important as the studio itself: Nugent's life work spans more than fifty years, ranging from the production of abstract welded metal sculpture, metal castings, religious artifacts, works in silver, and candlemaking, his works exhibited nationally and found in many important collections.[2] The building contains elements relating to Nugent's artistic production, such as the suspended hoist in the central section.[2]

Museum of Vancouver

Finally, another aspect of the studio's heritage is that it was constructed with help from Kenneth Lochhead and Roy Kiyooka, who along with Nugent and Wiens were all part of "a flowering of activity in the visual arts" in Saskatchewan following the creation of the Saskatchewan Arts Board in the second half of the twentieth century.[2]

Bozikovic remarks that the Studio is similar in shape to (and may have influenced the design of) what is now the Vancouver Museum.[11]