5468796 architecture
winnipeg, manitoba, canada
www.5468796.ca

You may know them for the Bond Tower, a narrow, 11-story mixed-use office complex on the boards for Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. But 5468796 architecture also is making inroads into multifamily with projects that renegotiate the category’s conventional living arrangements and strike a contrast with the conservative nature of the region’s built environment. One recent project features a publicly accessible courtyard in place of a fence as a fluid boundary, and another, which finished first-phase construction in 2011, segments its 18 three- and four-story townhouses with an architectural wrap.

“There didn’t seem to be a lot going on in terms of pushing the edge of design in our context here,” says co-founder Johanna Hurme. Hurme, a Helsinki, Finland, native, and co-founder Sasa Radulovic, who hails from Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, think an outsider’s perspective might be one factor in their breaking the mold.

Upon launching the firm in May 2007, Hurme says they received a commission daily for the first three weeks. Now, the 12-person team goes by a name that gives every indication of a highly collaborative ethos. “When we first incorporated the company, 5468796 was the number we were handed,” Hurme explains. “We’d rather not be named after ourselves ... everybody in the group can identify under the numbers.”

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years in practice: 5 / projects completed in 2011: 4 / firm size: 12 / areas of interest: multifamily, mixed-use, single-family