The century-old dream of a high-style, entirely factory-built house took an interesting step toward reality in Toronto last week. That’s when developer Steve Glenn, principal in the Los Angeles firm LivingHomes, and Toronto’s Nexterra Green Homes announced their plans to bring forth, on a shady ravine lot in North York, the greenest prefab luxury dwelling this town has probably ever seen. (The house, which is scheduled to be dropped in place by the end of this year, is the first of four similar buildings projected for the picturesque site.) Designed for Mr. Glenn by the senior southern California architect Ray Kappe, the 3,200-square-foot Toronto project will come loaded with just about every ecologically responsible feature you can think of.
The scheme calls for heating and air-conditioning to be provided by a geothermal system sunk deep into the earth. Photovoltaic cells on the roof will supplement, and ideally replace, the hydro that an ordinary house sucks from the electricity grid. The building envelope will be tightened up and super-insulated to resist the extremes of Toronto weather, the expanses of glass will be triple-paned containers of inert argon gas, and interior off-gassing will be curtailed or eliminated by the use of special paints and varnishes.
Mr. Glenn brings both entrepreneurial expertise and a keen sense of public service to the job of creating such housing. His ventures have included a $1-billion business incubation firm, a software company with high-profile corporate clients such as Oracle, Reuters and CBS, and, since 2006, the green real-estate development project LivingHomes. For the past several years, he has also been engaged as a volunteer with the William J. Clinton Foundation, labouring on projects ranging in topic from American childhood health to HIV/AIDS in Africa.
But the green home is where his heart has been for the past four years. The proof of Mr. Glenn’s commitment to green thinking is in the very first building done by LivingHomes: the Santa Monica residence of Mr. Glenn himself, which became the first new single-family home in the United States to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s top (platinum) rating under its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. If the Toronto house lives up to its billing, it could well attain platinum status under Canada’s own LEED regime.
The ecological guts are not, however, the only attractive things about this building. Take the architectural art of it, for example. Ray Kappe, who began his design career in the early 1950s, is a veteran practitioner of glassy southern California modernism. He brings to Toronto the moves he has long made in the sunnier southwest: the horizontal roof line, the extensive glazing of whole walls, the sweep of open interior space, a lightness of touch that is very southern California.
Instead of a lush tropical garden setting for his structure, of course, Mr. Kappe has been working in Toronto with the edge of a deep urban ravine. But as we find in this residence, his brand of American modernism is very open to nature of every kind, unconcerned about making a grand statement in the landscape, and content to be a kind of neat, modest transitional pavilion between the dense city fabric and the wild.
But while LivingHomes house invokes the old promise of beautiful, healthy factory-built dwellings for everyone, it also brings to mind what is still unfulfilled in that promise: a price point that could make this kind of housing genuinely affordable.
The asking price for the Toronto project is $1.6-million, though that figure includes everything – design, land costs, fabrication, transport, site preparation, appliances, the works. It’s a reasonable sum to expect for an experimental prototype that incorporates deluxe design and outfitting. And indeed, the price would come down if orders rushed in and the assembly line in Winnipeg started to mass-produce similar units.
As Mr. Glenn told me, such is the vision of LivingHomes: to supply 10 green homes this year (the current number he’s got under way), 20 next year, and many more eventually. Only in this gradual way can prefab eventually meet its historic goal of affordability.
Meanwhile, the North York LivingHomes house is an instance of the kind of green housing that may some day be possible, not just for a few, but for the millions.
