The place: home, sitting at your computer.
The task: to design a "green" house from a variety of parts provided by George Brown College's Institute without Boundaries (IwB) in partnership with Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp.
The fun: choosing between the traditional gable shape and a long, cigar-shaped design that maximizes the harvesting of passive solar heat. Or, inside, between the "Sofa Gigi" with a built-in coffee table, soy upholstery and recycled fabric, and the marmoleum-topped desk of computer-cut, laminated wood. Why not order both?
If Luigi Ferrara, director of the IwB, and Mark Salerno of CMHC are onto something, your next home — or, perhaps, that of your children — will be designed this way.
The canühome concept house, a cross between an aboriginal longhouse and the inside of a whale, has been engineered for fast assembly, disassembly and ease of transport. (GEORGE BROWN COLLEGE)
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Right now, however, the "canühome" is just an exhibit at the Green Living Show, kind of like the 1950s "dream car." Remember those? They didn't actually do some of the things their creators promised — take over the driving when you got tired or convert into aqua-mobiles for weekend pleasure cruises on the lake — but that wasn't the point, really. By allowing people to kick their fantastical tires in the relaxed atmosphere of an exhibit hall, the way was paved (pardon the pun) for acceptance of some fantastic ideas down the road.
So, while you can't order your very own canühome just yet, it may suggest ways to go green in your own life.
"Most of the stuff here is available off the shelf," Mr. Salerno confirms, "and then there's other stuff that stirs the imagination, [such as] the visual expression."
Mr. Ferrara agrees: "Eighty per cent of what has to be done has to be done with existing housing, so people being able to take ideas and retrofit their existing house is as important as something being made new. The whole idea is not so much that [the canühome is] a fixed system … but that it's an adaptable system that the consumer interacts with."
There has been plenty of interaction thus far. After design charrettes with architects, structural engineers and laypeople, Mr. Ferrara, his staff, and IwB students produced 80 pages of technical drawings. Then, Juice Works, an exhibit manufacturing company that partnered with CMHC on the Sustainable Condo in 2004, started construction.
The result is something akin to an aboriginal longhouse on the outside, and, on the inside, with its giant structural plywood "ribs," something like what Jonah saw after being swallowed by the whale. Folks at Yorkdale Mall will get a chance to interact with it in June, and, after that, perhaps people as far away as Italy and Dubai.
The canühome exhibit, which measures 20 by 50 feet and has an interior space of about 850 square feet, has been engineered for fast assembly, disassembly and ease of transport. That means if it ever did go into production as a real house, costs would be kept down.
"The best type of prefabrication is not where you're shipping a giant trailer and air, the best kind is where you ship things that are nicely compacted as parts and they erect very quickly," explains Mr. Ferrara, who adds that some research still needs to be done on "envelopes and water-tightness."
Speaking of which, canühome's most intriguing feature is its passive solar "double envelope." Air passing between the two exterior walls on the south side is heated via the dark metal panels of the outermost skin. This heated air travels up and is vented out of the top in summer but, in winter, continues around the other side and into the radiant floor, which keeps the house about 10 degrees. After that, says Mr. Ferrara, all you need to do is bring the floor up another six degrees because "when your feet are warm, actually, your whole body is warm and you don't have to have it at 20 degrees."
Although "everyone's known for 30 years" that having two separate walls trapping air was the best way to build — insulating "out of thin air," as Mr. Ferrara puts it — it was cost-prohibitive for the simple reason that building two walls costs, well, double.
Canühome's "breakthrough" was the invention of a new fastener called a "Porcupine." These attach to the wooden structural ribs, extend outward to create the air gap and terminate where the outermost metal panels clip on. Not only is this method much cheaper, it's flexible.
When the price of active solar panels comes down, you could unclip certain segments of the outer skin and add those instead, arranged to follow the sun as it climbs and falls in the sky.
As with the structural ribs, the custom furniture is fabricated from wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (thereby meeting LEED standards). Appliances are grouped together in one area so their excess heat is captured and pumped into the double envelope. Rainwater running down the exterior is directed into a cistern and used to flush toilets; grey water is purified through a bio-garden both inside and outside of the house to make it suitable for irrigation.
Like the 1950s "dream car," the canühome is the sole prototype, and many of its features remain unproven. But the fact that it was developed through a collaboration between the federal government, an educational think tank, green industry leaders, start-up companies and TD Canada Trust means that being handed the keys to something like a canühome in the not-too-distant future is no pipe dream.
"We're already itching to do version three," Mr. Ferrara concludes with a laugh.
The Green Living Show runs today through Sunday at the Direct Energy Centre, Exhibition Place. For more information see www.canuhome.com or www.greenlivingshow.ca.
