With everything turning green around us — homes and offices, cars, even pet foods — you could be forgiven for stopping and wondering: It's great, this good ecological consciousness that's all the rage, but, in the final analysis, do so-called green technologies actually work?
Is it possible that human beings and the things we do are just naturally too dirty and expensive, and that all the green inventions in the world can't get rid of our big, ugly carbon footprints?
I found myself puzzling over these questions after a chat last week with Drew Hauser and Hector Tuminan, architects with the Toronto firm Stanford Downey.
They are at work on an interesting project: a new rental housing property to be operated by Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC), landlord of the city's 58,000 units of public accommodation. With 100 apartments ranging in size from 500 to 1,350 square feet, the building (now under construction at the corner of Carlton and Mutual streets, on downtown Toronto's east side) will not be grand. If it's aesthetically a cut above most social housing in Toronto, the staid design of the 11-storey tower is still not the kind of exceptional architecture we should expect in our inner city. The last thing we need there is another residential project that looks like a motel at an expressway interchange.
The architects and Toronto Community Housing Corp. have taken great care to make sure the new rental housing building on Carlton Street is as environmentally responsible as possible. (STANFORD DOWNEY)
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But putting to one side whatever complaints I have about this building's exterior treatment, one thing makes it exceptional: the impressive care the architects and their client are taking to ensure it is as environmentally responsible as possible.
Two old structures on Carlton (rumoured, say the architects, to have long ago housed the workers who constructed nearby Maple Leaf Gardens) have been saved, and will be recycled into the overall scheme.
Rescuing these antiques is a welcome bit of architectural preservation, and represents the kind of mindfulness we would like to see exercised much more often. It's hardly important that the buildings are architecturally unexceptional. They are components of Toronto's historic downtown streetscape, and that's something that should be disrupted as seldom as possible.
For the first time, TCHC will have a building heated and cooled, in part, by a ground-source heat pump. This new technology, which capitalizes on the unchanging temperature of the earth just below the surface, is believed to lessen a building's dependence on energy produced by conventional power stations. (Among the very few Toronto residential projects using this system is developer Harry Stinson's High Park Lofts, in the city's west end, which is another work by Stanford Downey.)
Among other energy-saving features of the building will be roof-mounted solar panels designed to preheat hot water, and a system intended to redistribute heated and cooled air within the structure, as differences are created by (for example) long hours of sunshine striking one surface of the fabric.
And the windows of suites will incorporate an ingenious new glazing system that distributes sunlight inside the apartment, and prevents glare, more effectively than the floor-to-ceiling glass panels customary in high-rises. Further control of light and heat coming from the sun into the suites will be provided by exterior solar shades on the south and east facades.
All of which leads me back to one of my initial questions. Will these measures work? By which I mean: make life inside the suites more pleasant for residents, and do so in ways that make economic sense in an environment of ever-rising energy costs?
Surely no green system, however attractive otherwise, will make its way into the general housing marketplace unless it proves to be cost-effective. And therein lies my trouble with geothermal heating and cooling technologies, and other devices that have been developed to counter North American society's enormous and increasing hunger for energy: I have not been convinced that they are viable solutions to the grave problem. There may be no solution. We may simply be too far along the road of high-energy living to turn back, at least until the planet itself puts a stop to our greedy consumption.
But even grumps like me have to admit the Carlton Street project of Mr. Hauser and Mr. Tuminan is an engaging experiment in conservation. I hereby promise that, if I'm still writing this column in a few years — and the world hasn't ended — I will return to this building to see if things turned out as expected. I hope they do. It will certainly be interesting to find out.
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