Lou Ampas didn't have a minute to spare.
It was a Friday morning in January, 2007, and the architect needed to get to the ferry terminal serving Toronto Island Airport as fast as he could so he could catch a mid-morning flight to Ottawa.
If he didn't, six months worth of work would go to waste, and the chance would be lost to build three unique townhouses in downtown Toronto that would produce as much energy as they consumed in a year.
"I just grabbed everything, jumped in my car ... and hightailed it," says Mr. Ampas, a principal of Coolearth Architecture Inc.
But he was too late. As he whipped his car into a parking space near the terminal, the ferry was pulling away and he started to panic.
The proposal he clutched in his hand - a document he and a room of architects, engineers, professors and students had worked through the night finishing - had to get to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. by 2 p.m., and the last means of getting it there was leaving without him. "It was like a nightmare," he recalls.
In July, 2006, CMHC had called for proposals for its EQuilibrium sustainable housing competition, an initiative created to promote dwellings that produce as much energy as they consume.
Mr. Ampas joined a team of like-minded Ryerson University professors, students, and other industry professionals to submit a proposal. To set themselves apart, the team - known as the Sustainable Urbanism Initiative - wanted to prove that an energy-efficient house could be built smack in the middle of a densely populated urban neighbourhood.
So Mr. Ampas twisted the arm of long-time friend and developer Spero Bassil to get involved in the project.
The team selected a piece of land Mr. Bassil owned on the corner of Davenport Road and Dupont Street in the Annex - next to a 3½-storey apartment that Mr. Bassil also owns - as a potential site.
They called the project Top of the Annex Townhomes, and designed three, 2,300-square-foot freehold condominium townhouses to be built on the infill site.
"That was our objective," says Professor Mark Gorgolewski, one of the initiative's leaders and a Ryerson University professor of architectural science. "Not to show that you could do it out in the suburbs or somewhere on optimal sites, but [that] you can do this in really difficult locations.
"We felt that it was paramount to show that you can live in the downtown area in a sustainable home, you could walk to work, you could walk to shops - you don't need to have a car, or even if you want to have a car, you don't need to use it most of the time," Prof. Gorgolewski says.
The project had appeal - and would get an injection of $50,000 from CMHC, but only if the team made the entry deadline.
So as the ferry pulled away on that day in January, Mr. Ampas dashed to the edge of the terminal and started hollering for it stop.
"My heart was coming out," he says.
That's when two men standing next to him attempted to calm him down. As luck would have it, one was Porter Airlines president Robert Deluce and the other was one of his employees. A distraught Mr. Ampas explained his predicament, and both men calmly pulled out their cellphones, and, after a few calls, the plane was put on hold for the architect.
Mr. Ampas caught the flight, the team made the deadline, and Top of the Annex Townhomes was selected a month later as one of 12 winners in the competition. (Another Toronto model, the Now House - a Second World War-era house in the Topham Park area of East York - also won.)
