I'm too young to have heard the great media guru Marshall McLuhan speak, or even to get a sense of the impact he had on the Toronto (and the world) of 40 years ago. I imagine, however, that his influence wasn't so much the result of one big boom of an idea, but of the tap-tap-tapping of many smaller ones coming from his Centre for Culture and Technology. They were so persistent, they couldn't be ignored.
Recently, I visited a place where Mr. McLuhan would have felt right at home: the Institute without Boundaries (IwB), part of George Brown College's school of design. At its headquarters five feet below the sidewalk at 207 Adelaide St. East, the IwB — part think tank, part design studio, part laboratory and part global classroom — is brewing big ideas, and the biggest of them may affect how we all live a few decades from now.
"What if we could design buildings that produce their own oxygen, distill water, accrue solar energy, change with the seasons and produce no waste?" That question was the call to action answered by 15 post-graduate students — some from as far away as Belgium, Honduras and Costa Rica — now designing the "World House." (The question is set in bold type over a picture of bubbling water on the cover of a small booklet that is similar in graphic style to Mr. McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's 1967 book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.)
What the World House will not be is clear on its website. A blurry McMansion partially obliterated by the words "We are not going to build this house" confronts visitors to www.worldhouse.ca.
What it will end up looking like is less defined, however, since the IwB is not interested in aesthetics but rather a set of guidelines that will be "scalable" to different countries.
"Our mission is to create a Web-based housing-design system adaptable to local context worldwide," explains the institute's director, Luigi Ferrara, an architect, senator at the International Council of the Societies of Industrial Design, and the former vice-president of programs and services for the Design Exchange in Toronto.
So a World House built in Somalia would look very different from one in Sweden since each location has a unique "recipe" of budget, family size, soil and climate. Both houses, however, would be built to be equally responsible as to how they used and recycled the Earth's resources.
While Mr. Ferrara and his students aren't at the point of rolling out this design system just yet, their preliminary research is fascinating. (The IwB has been around since 2003, and collaborated with Bruce Mau on the "Massive Change" exhibition and book, but this is the first year for the World House project).
They've reconfigured a prefabricated house design to see how well it would work as a World House, figuring out how to make parts shippable by mail — a sort of "eBay house" — and even dreaming up ways it could cling to the blank sides or cluster on rooftops of commercial buildings.
They've come up with an amazing system of rating the sustainability of 100 housing types — from the humble igloo and teepee to the Maison de Verre in Paris and Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie style. (The igloo was the clear winner.)
They're now putting the finishing touches on a timeline that traces the evolution of the home from 10,000 years ago to today. This effort is meant "to help us project where [housing] might evolve to," Mr. Ferrara explains.
They've also invented the eight-sided "Oca-Home" and the "Stu-Pod," a "portable-on-demand" student home.
The work is eclectic because of the mixture of minds and the space in which they're allowed to play. The faculty consists of architects, an entrepreneur, builders and a filmmaker, and the students include graphic and multimedia designers, engineers, architects, fine artists, as well as an industrial designer, a biologist and a reflexologist.
The workspace — more akin to an open-plan design studio than formal classroom — encourages collaboration.
"There's this interchange of knowledge between the parties that's lifting everyone's awareness," Mr. Ferrara says, clearly proud of this new model of learning and teaching.
Since, as Mr. McLuhan has said, we are all crew on spaceship Earth, the institute is working hard at erasing more than just physical classroom boundaries. Eventually, they'll network via computers with schools around the globe and, hopefully, fulfill their mandate to get outside and build "real projects" the public can see and touch here in Toronto.
"We could build a house, test it for a year ... then move it and give it to a family for Habitat for Humanity, or we could give it to Eva's Phoenix [housing for homeless students in Toronto]," he says.
Unfortunately, securing the sort of highly visible public location or obtaining a piece of private land on which to do this sort of thing isn't proving easy.
Perhaps a champion at city hall or a benevolent private donor will step in and help.
Regardless, with so many incredible new ideas flying up from just below the sidewalk at Jarvis and Adelaide, what is now a quiet and insistent tap-tap-tapping may soon be too loud to ignore.
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Wednesdays during Toronto at Noon and Sunday mornings. Send inquiries to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.
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