Jacqueline Young

Winnipeg Design Festival Exhibition

245 Portage Ave

Open for viewing Fridays and Saturdays noon to 4pm. Plus during Design Fest Events.

Once a very fine example of Brutalist Architecture in Winnipeg, the Public Safety Building, designed by Les Stechesen while working for Libling Michener, was completed in 1966 and served as a jail and police headquarters. In 2006, after decades of enduring Winnipeg’s intense freeze/thaw cycles, failure in the limestone cladding necessitated the installation of a plywood covered walkway to protect pedestrians from falling debris. Ultimately, the City of Winnipeg decided that repairing and upgrading the building would not provide value to the community or contribute to revitalization initiatives. The building was demolished in 2020.

This image is one of a series made during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when my commissioned work came to a grinding halt.

Jacqueline Young (she/her) is an award winning Winnipeg-based architecture and interiors photographer. She formally trained in Architecture at the University of Manitoba and in photography at PrairieView. Her enthusiasm for documentation comes from her fondness for the technical nature of the photographic process, in pursuit of expressing the novel experience of light and people moving throughout the built environment. Young chooses to focus her practice on capturing what is present, rather than chasing “the ideal”. 

Her work has been published in Canadian Architect, SAB Magazine, THE PLAN, The Architectural Review, Archinect, Architizer, and Archdaily.