Canadian History at Core of New Human Rights Museum

After more than a decade of planning and construction, the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens September 20 in Winnipeg.

The first national museum built outside the National Capital Region, the CMHR is situated near the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, across the railway tracks from the heart of downtown Winnipeg and across the river from the French community of St. Boniface. The site on Treaty One land is believed to have been a First Nations meeting place for thousands of years, and a major archaeological dig uncovered hundreds of thousands of objects indicating centuries of use by Aboriginal peoples.

Visitors enter between the building’s massive “roots,” which were inspired by the exposed tree roots architect Antoine Predock noticed along the nearby riverbank during one of his many site visits. A curving glass “cloud” envelopes the south and west sides of the building, and the distinctive “Tower of Hope” rises one hundred metres.

The museum’s eleven main galleries are housed inside the Manitoba Tyndall stone-clad “mountain” that forms the core of the building. They are linked by a set of overlapping walkways covered in translucent Spanish alabaster and lit from within.

For more on the museum, see the article “Rallying Point” in the August-September 2014 issue of Canada’s History magazine. And for more about the museum’s main galleries, click on the images below (images are courtesy of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights).