1919 – Winning design for War Memorial Museum, Regina, Saskatchewan

In May 1919, a limited competition was announced for a Museum as War Memorial for the grounds of the provincial legislature in Regina, Saskatchewan. The entrants all received payment for their work, highly unusual at this time, and the assessors were Mr. Septimus Warwick, F.R.I.B.A., Montreal, and Ramsay Traquair, Professor of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal.

“The treatment, which is generally homogeneous on all sides, is dominated by the requirements of the north elevation, with which a fountain is incorporated, and the west elevation, designed as a background to the proposed memorial sculpture group and containing the main entrance.

Pylons inscribed with the battles of the various campaigns and the frieze containing the dedication render the intention of the building in words. The panels over Hie windows containing the badges of the Saskatchewan units (5th Western Cavalry, 28th Battalion, etc., etc.’, will have meaning for those who bore these emblems The draped and wreathed urns flanking the entrance are intended as a hint of the sentiment attaching to the Hall of Honor within, with its long tale of the Province’s losses.

The design is a frank attempt by the omission of intervening walls where possible to connect the various elements, as far as may be, under one ceiling, coterminuous with the area of the building. This solution combines effects of space with very great structural economy.

The Hall of Honor thus merges at the one end with the entrance and at the other with the main staircase, giving a vista of over eight}’ feet, while it is flanked by the open courts of the War Relics Museum. The War Museum thus contains the Hall of Honor within itself, a room of monumental proportions, 140 feet long, resulting. Wall piers and obelisks and a slight difference in floor levels serve as demarcations between the parts. Wrought iron screens within the Hall of Honor enable the building to be closed off when required into three sections:
(A) Administrative and Records.
(B) War Museum.
(C) Provincial Museum.

On entering the Curator’s Offices and the Board Room are found flanking the vestibule; beyond the first screen is the War Museum and beyond the second the Provincial Museum containing on the lower floor the Department of Ethnology and History, and on the u|)per the whole Natural History collections in the suite of galleries open to the upper part of the War Museum.

Adjoining the service entrance and the administrative offices is the freight elevator connecting the basement store and work room with the War Museum and the Provincial Museum galleries.

The main internal architectural features are the tablets for the honor rolls on the piers and obelisks surrounding the Hall of Honor. The lower walls of the War Museum Courts provides places for large decorative paintings:— panoramic views of such historic battle grounds as (1) Vimy Ridge, (2) Ypres, (3) The Somme Valley, and (4) Cambrai, are suggested.”
Construction, September 1919

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