Vancouver's Patkau Architects has just collected another matching set of honours to go with the two Governor General's medals it received in May of this year. Last week, two of the firm's current undertakings--an ambitious addition to the Winnipeg Centennial Library and a 320-bed student residence at the University of Pennsylvania--won Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence, bestowed annually by the magazine for projects in the design phase. (Two other Vancouver firms, Acton Ostry Architects and BattersbyHowat, were also winners.)

As these ventures show, Patkau works on both sides of the Canada­U.S. border. This has allowed John Patkau, one of its principals, to observe the ways in which the distinct social attitudes of the two countries are embodied in their built environments.

"In Canada, as a country that's a little bit more socially oriented than, say, the States, there is an interest in the social-community dimensions of buildings that is an important part of Canadian architecture," said Patkau on the line to the Straight from Winnipeg, where he's touring the site of the library renovation, which will add a dramatic terraced reading room to the existing structure. "There is also, I think, a general consensus in Canada about modern architecture, as opposed to the United States, which tends even today to have a lot of historical styles being built....America is an increasingly conservative country, and the architecture tends to reflect that."

This homegrown sense of the importance of social space informs Patkau's plans for the Centennial Library's overhaul, which, with the collaboration of the Winnipeg firm LM Architectural Group, will turn a structure that he describes as an example of the "heavy, brooding, fortresslike" style of the '70s into an open communal nexus.

"The design in Winnipeg is an interesting situation because it's an addition and renovation of an existing central library," Patkau explained. "So, unlike the Vancouver library, or the Seattle library...the Winnipeg one has this other dimension to it, which is how you take a building that was designed in the 1970s--a handsome building but in many ways just a big place for books--and convert it into a place for people. And that's really the important contribution that we've made in our Winnipeg design. We've taken a bunkerlike building, an introverted building, and opened it up and made it into what I think is going to be a spectacular people place. And I think it'll be a community centre, a place where everybody comes together. It's pretty exciting."