Macklin Hancock points to his rubber boots. "I'm just a farmer," he says with a chuckle that wrinkles his elfin face.
Some may see him more as a Renaissance man.
Since both are probably right, there's no point settling on just one description of this Second World War Spitfire pilot, devoted family man, landscape architect and, as his business card says so matter-of-factly, designer of "towns and cities, environments and habitats."
During his 52-year career, the 79-year-old's mind has been fertile ground for ideas for living that have sprouted up all over the world as healthy, inviting places for human beings to grow and feel good about themselves.
I'd always wanted to meet Mr. Hancock, since I grew up beside his best-known habitat, Don Mills, and admire it for its cohesive planning, daring modern architecture and incorporation of "garden city" concepts first published by Ebenezer Howard in 1898. When Mr. Hancock gave me directions to his house over the telephone, I knew right away that he was my kind of guy: an abstract thinker and planner.
"Now, you get off at Hurontario -- did you know that was the first cloverleaf intersection in Canada? -- then do a curvilinear sort of move so that you double back and are facing Toronto again, then surge up and over the creek . . ." My pen worked furiously not only to keep pace but to take down only what was relevant to actually getting there.
A few weeks later, I found myself sitting comfortably in the high-ceilinged and glassy 1962 addition to his father's 1930 house in Mississauga where Woodland Nurseries, the Hancock family business, is also located.
"This is where it all happened," he says, lifting his arms in the air. The "it" being Don Mills, Flemingdon Park, Erin Mills, Expo 67, parts of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Century City in California and communities in places as far-flung as Kuwait and Tanzania.
And what a place for Mr. Hancock's ideas to flower: A large, private, shady four-acre rectangle of land now hemmed in by a postwar subdivision, it still looks much like what the rest of Mississauga must have when the elder Hancock built his house here. Turning onto a narrow, dirt road from a paved suburban street, the short drive through an aperture of trees and lush vegetation to reach Mr. Hancock's house forces a sloughing off of fast-paced city life and its assorted minutiae. This is definitely a place for dreaming big. Where better to plan cities than a place that offers no city-like distractions? Every day is a clean slate in the fresh air.
Mr. Hancock first found joy as "a farmer" when he was six years old by working alongside his father, Leslie, who began Woodland Nurseries in 1931. Studying the natural world at such an early age would prepare him for his education as a landscape architect when he attended his father's alma mater, the Ontario Agricultural College (now the University of Guelph) and, after the war, when he attended Harvard for postgraduate work.
It was at Harvard that Mr. Hancock discovered his talents lay not just in the natural world of trees and plants but in the built world as well.
Two of his mentors included architecture department chairman Walter Gropius, who founded the highly influential Bauhaus school in Germany in 1919, and Sir William Holford, visiting professor of town planning at University College London and inventor of the postwar English "New Towns."
They encouraged him to expand his horizons by studying architecture and urban planning in addition to landscape architecture. However, it was his father-in-law, Karl Fraser, who changed his life forever.
At Harvard, Mr. Hancock was working on James Rouse's new idea of shopping malls and how they might work as central hubs in housing developments. At about the same time, Mr. Fraser, one of business tycoon E.P. Taylor's men, was put in charge of developing more than 2,000 acres that Mr. Taylor's company, O'Keefe Realty Ltd., had purchased in what was then the Township of North York.
When Mr. Hancock caught wind of this, he was interested to see what sort of plans Mr. Fraser had commissioned: He convinced his father-in-law that the plans wouldn't do and that, while only 27 years old, he was the man for the job. Although not finished his postgraduate degree at Harvard, Mr. Hancock decided he could learn a good deal more implementing the concepts taught to him by Messrs. Gropius and Holford and Hideo Sasaki on the ground at Don Mills rather than on paper at the Harvard studios.
Mr. Gropius's right-hand-man, a Dr. Berger, laughed when he saw the scope of the Don Mills project, thinking it too pie-in-the-sky to ever get built and, furthermore, too much for such a young man to take on. But "after it got going and it was in Time magazine and things like that, he changed his mind and they gave me a big banquet," Mr. Hancock recalls with a twinkle in his eye.
Don Mills would become the most important postwar development in Canada. For sheer scale and influence, it ranks up there with the three American "Levittowns" created by builder William J. Levitt in New York and Pennsylvania.
But it compares more closely to the neighbourhoods developed by Joseph Eichler in the San Francisco bay area.
As former Toronto mayor John Sewell writes in The Shape of the City, Levittown was "simply an unending collection of streets lined by repetitious and inexpensive houses." In contrast, Mr. Eichler used young architects to design daring yet affordable homes for the middle class in suburban areas that only sometimes provided small shopping areas. Mr. Hancock and his assistant architect, Douglas Lee, went one better: They built an entire architect-designed, self-sufficient town that had everything a person needed to live. Don Mills was not a suburb nor was it never intended to be.
"Don Mills is now wrapped into the suburbs, [but]it still is like a New Town," Mr. Hancock says, adding that "it's degenerated recently" but "the people there still want to keep it the way it is."
And "the way it is" today and the way it was when it was conceived in 1952 is modern. Messrs. Hancock and Lee laid down the law early in planning their brave new town 12 kilometres northeast of downtown Toronto: If you want to build here -- houses, factories, libraries, churches, banks and even the shopping centre -- it had better meet with our approval or it doesn't get built.
Colour-palettes were prepared by Mr. Hancock's sister, Marjorie, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD) who "understood colour, she understood the relationship of one building to another," he explains.
If a builder didn't have an architect who could carry out Mr. Hancock's vision, one would be provided for him. To this end, Hancock and Lee amassed a stable of architects that would eventually become Canada's brightest stars. Names such as Peter Dickinson, James A. Murray, Henry Fliess, Irving Grossman and John C. Parkin (with the firm of John B. Parkin and Associates, no relation) all worked for Mr. Hancock at various stages.
John B. Parkin and Associates was so heavily involved in the Don Mills project that Mr. Hancock tried to persuade them to move their offices to one of the designated industrial areas. At first, they thought it a strange idea: Why relocate a white-collar architectural practice to an industrial area? So, Mr. Hancock, always the persuader, told them: "This is a new kind of industry, it's pharmaceuticals, it's not where you have a foundry!" Shortly thereafter, the Parkin firm was located in Don Mills.
While the commercial heart was the shopping centre at Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue, each neighbourhood "quadrant" that bracketed it on every side had its own heart, too. Central to each was a school and a church in "every denomination we could think of," Mr. Hancock says.
Pedestrian pathways led from each neighbourhood quadrant back to the shopping centre, so that "you could go around your town without getting in the way of high-speed cars," he says, tracing imaginary lines on the table in front of him. Outside of the residential areas -- with walkup apartments and row houses in addition to single-family dwellings for a true mixed-income community -- were the industrial areas.
The hope was that you could both live and work in Don Mills, thereby preventing it from degenerating into just another bedroom community.
The final protective outer layer were the greenbelts: Wilket Creek to the west, a golf course and E.P. Taylor's Windfields Farm to the north, the Don Valley to the east and Flemingdon Farm to the south. These boundaries are much harder to see today, since Don Mills itself has been surrounded by developments on all sides. But when it was all crisp in the mid-1950s, it was as modern as jet travel and Mr. Hancock and Mr. Lee couldn't get it built fast enough to keep up with the demand.
"Canada suddenly flowered, it wanted to be modern, it didn't want to be ancient, it didn't want Victorian houses," Mr. Hancock says of the postwar period. "What it wanted was housing for the future that people could afford. And, affordable housing was the fundamental idea behind [Don Mills]"
Before Mr. Hancock was finished with Don Mills, he designed the communities of Erin Mills and Meadowvale. After that, with his company Project Planning Inc., it was time to tackle the north shore of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Century City in California. Then, he gave the things he learned while designing Canadian communities to other parts of the world.
"This form of housing is in Tanzania, for instance," he says without a trace of braggadocio, then continues, "it dribbled from one place to another and so I can say it was seen as something important: How to design a community, how to design and plan towns and cities and universities and everything that you need in a lifetime."
Even at the age of 79, Macklin Hancock, the "farmer," shows no signs of slowing down. He's just returned from a trip to China to consult on the hospital his grandfather built, Drum Tower Hospital in Nanjing (where Mr. Hancock was born, incidentally), he talks regularly with his six children and flies his Cessna 180 every chance he gets.
On top of it all, he displays such humility for what he's accomplished that I must remind myself that a great deal of how I interact with Toronto is a result of the work by the man sitting across from me.
"Mack was an idealist," says his former assistant, architect Douglas Lee. "He was also a humanist and a very socially conscious person and highly principled. He did not compromise a great deal and I think that's one of the reasons he achieved as much as he did." And, he added: "He loved Chinese food, and that couldn't be all bad."
Dave LeBlanc