Clifford Wiens

Clifford Wiens was born on 27 April 1916, to a Mennonite family that lived on a farm outside of Glen Ker, Saskatchewan.

From an early age, Wiens had an intense interest in design and construction.

Clifford Donald Wiens (27 April 1926 – 25 January 2020) was a Canadian writer, poet, designer and architect.

Clifford Wiens played a crucial role in the development of corporate modern architecture and the broader Expressionist Movement in postwar Mid-West Canada.

Wiens was defined as a poetic architect and his projects reflect this through their communication with both the client and the user.

This poetry was best shown in his work on the University of Regina Heating and Cooling Building.

Clifford Wiens has held a few design philosophies throughout his career as an architect and designer.

Aside from communication between all parties, the belief he most prioritized was that architecture is all about pleasing the user's eye, mind, and body.

Another belief that he held firm was that an architect must design a project that works, firmly believing that flashy buildings that fail to satisfy both the client and the user are failures.

He also strongly believed that the architect is an improver and when an architect does things well that the world is improved.

Raised in Glen Kerr, Saskatchewan, Wiens did not originally study architecture.

He would instead begin his post secondary schooling with agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan with a full scholarship that came from the Wheat Pool Sponsorship program from the Moose Jaw Technical School.

Clifford Wiens would then transfer out of the program, and study painting at the Banff Centre for Continuing Education with AY Jackson.

As a child in the 1930s, he was renowned by all those that knew him for building small detailed cities in the mud after a rainy day.

He would help his father construct chicken coops, barbed wire fences, waterwheels and houses for the various farm cats.

He would even build working contraptions of his own design from various abandoned pieces of farming equipment.

Upon being asked later in life, Wiens stated that building the cat houses was not play; "that was their place, not mine. I was an architect and I did not know it".

His innovative tendencies came from both these construction projects, and his father.

His father strongly encouraged self-reliance and often gave Wiens projects that required innovative ways to complete.

For instance, Wiens and one of his two brothers would need to drive holes into the ground for fence posts around their property.

Instead of simply digging a starter hole and forcing the post down, Wiens would utilize a Crowbar to start the hole and then drive the post down.

This allowed for the pole to be driven into the ground more effectively be removing that rigid outermost layer of the dirt.

Living on the prairies also offered Wiens an opportunity to develop a strong connection to nature and art during his childhood.

Wiens would make his own paint brushes from horse and ox hair to paint whenever he had the opportunity to.

He pursued this interest largely in solitude and later in his life during his retirement.

His artwork would commonly depict the surrounding landscape of whatever region he was living within and the farm on which he was raised on.

Clifford Wien's education started in a one-room school located in the downtown area of Glen Ker.

Due to his Mennonite heritage, Wien's first languages were low and high German.

He would eventually learn English by the age of 7.

After graduating high school, Wiens would further his education with an undergraduate degree in agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan in 1943 in Saskatoon.

He attended the university under a wheat pool sponsorship program for young farmers and machine tooling, granted by the Moose Jaw Technical School.

Eventually, Wiens would decide to leave the agriculture program to pursue one of his passions of painting.

He would study painting at the Banff Centre for Continuing Education, now known as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

He would study under the tutelage of A.Y. Jackson, a founder of the Group of Seven.

His time studying with Jackson would be relatively short however, as Wiens decided that the lack of job prospects in the field of painting was very daunting.

Wiens would then choose to follow his passion of designing and construction, by continuing his education at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1949.

He was accepted into the school on a full scholarship and began studies in Industrial Design with the intention of eventually designing farm equipment.

He would ultimately switch to architecture after his first year, however, as the architecture curriculum at the Rhode Island School of Design was heavily influenced by the idea of modernism from the Bauhaus.

Wiens would then move on from painting due to an inability to find a career in it and study at the Rhode Island School of Design on a full scholarship and graduate in 1954.

Upon his completion of the program, Wiens would return to Regina and establish his own architecture firm in 1957.