800 Sherbrook Street

More Information

The Manitoba Rehabilitation Hospital opened in 1963, housing 158 beds for physical medicine and rehabilitation patients and sixty-four beds for tuberculosis patients. Designed by Winnipeg firm Moody, Moore & Partners, the structure possessed three constituent blocks arranged around an open courtyard space featuring planting and a fountain: a six-storey rehabilitation wing (fronting Sherbrook Street), a four-storey (north) tuberculosis wing and a one-storey rehabilitation wing (to the south). Viewed from the east this modernist structure – with a projecting second-level space (initially an auditorium) sheltering the entrance – is comparable in its general arrangement to Ottawa City Hall by the firm of Rother, Bland and Trudeau (1955-58), a hallmark in Canadian modern design. Exterior balconies along the rehabilitation wing echo those of the Bauhaus, an influential modernist school in Dessau, Germany, executed by Walter Gropius in 1926. The Rehabilitation Hospital’s exterior is clad in white marble and grey granite and brick. On the interior the initial fitments comprised of concrete, ceramic tile, quartz slate, terrazzo, linoleum and cork tile.