page_title: Clifford Wiens
section_title: Spiral Teepee Picnic Shelters (1970)
hierarchical_section_title: Clifford Wiens / Career / Wiens and Associates Ltd., 1970–1979 / Spiral Teepee Picnic Shelters (1970)
caption_attribution_description: Nakusp Hot Springs
context_page_description: Clifford Donald Wiens was a Canadian architect, designer, and author.
  The first two-thirds of his professional career spanned forty years, a diverse body of architectural work found throughout Saskatchewan including designs for schools and hospitals, chapels and churches, motel and apartment buildings, private residences, buildings for corporations and health spas, dairy creameries in Regina and Saskatoon, and a Trans-Canada Highway campground. He completed over one hundred projects.
  During the early phase of his career in the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by his relationship with the group of abstract painters known as the Regina Five as well as his own background in industrial design, Wiens actively sought out new ideas and innovations in architecture, interested in developing a style responsive to the prairie landscape and history, developing a reputation for "inventive" architectural and structural details and "simple but strong forms".
  Wiens achieved his greatest prominence after Expo 67, winning three Massey Award medals, Canada's top award for architecture, more than any other Saskatchewan architect, and two National Design Council of Canada Awards.
context_section_description: Wiens would still sometimes undertake small, idiosyncratic projects, such as the Spiral Teepee Picnic Shelters located in provincial parks across Saskatchewan, which Thompson describes as "just an upward whorl of wood open at one end," with room enough inside for a family to sit and have lunch or wait out a downpour. Because construction was scheduled for winter when the ground is frozen the design called for only the centre pole to penetrate the ground, then footings were added in the spring. Wiens also planned the design so that rafter poles would absorb some ground movement. The same year, Wiens served as president of the Saskatchewan Association of Architects. The shelters were recognized by the Architectural Awards Program for 1975, sponsored jointly by the American Institute of Architects and the Red Cedar Shingle and Handsplit Shake Bureau with a "first award" in the commercial-institutional category. In 2018, the shelters were included in a MacKenzie Art Gallery exhibition curated by Timothy Long on the experience of driving through the Province.
caption: Nakusp Hot Springs in 2019
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