WINONA HISTORY MUSEUM

Taking inspiration from the play of surfaces in the 1915 National Guard Armory that houses the Winona County Historical Society’s Museum, this new gallery and entry extension refocuses the armory’s monumental entry portal into a spatial sequence that dissolves the formerly opaque building into a more public display fitting its new use. The material of the armory’s façade is extended across a new street wall onto an adjacent lot, and horizontally divided above the ground floor into a lower zone of corbelled brick columns and an offset copper mass framing a roof terrace that provides views of Winona’s historic downtown and surrounding landscape. The ground-floor colonnade touches the armory in a forced perspective that transforms from narrow corbelled slits to a large-portal-sized aperture where the two buildings meet; approached from the building entry on the inside, seamless rear glazing forms a perspectival gradient that at turns dematerializes and frames the street.

Further inside, the new addition re-presents the existing brick wall of the armory as an artifact, with circulation interacting up and through the wall at points connecting the various levels of the conjoined buildings. Interior finishes continue a narrative with the past: intensive use of reclaimed wood nods to Winona’s history as a major lumber shipping port, and an intricate screen wall concealing the main stair abstracts an iconic archival photograph owned by the museum while recalling the encrusted ornament of other buildings in Winona’s largely intact mid-19th century downtown district.

With HGA Architects and Engineers / Joan Soranno FAIA, Design Principal and John Cook FAIA, Project Architect

Winona, Minnesota USA

Client: Winona County Historical Society

Photography: Paul Crosby

Honor Award for Architecture, AIA Minnesota