JANE GADD
From Friday's Globe and Mail
The most culturally and technically ambitious home in Canada is a fold-up box encased in aluminum that still carries smears of road dust from a cross-country truck ride.
The All Terrain Cabin (ATC), a 480-square-foot home that folds up into an 8- by 8- by 20-foot container the size of a standard shipping container, travelled for four days from Vancouver to be the centrepiece of this weekend's Metro Home Show at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre before continuing on a world tour.
The tiny, efficient showcase home carries a lot of cultural freight — its creators want the ATC to launch a whole new national identity for Canada, one that leaves the traditional icons of log cabins, totem poles and Mounties in the past and promotes the ingenuity, artistry and environmental smarts of contemporary Canadian designers.
“As we become a global economy, our cultural identity has to define us, or we just become non-descript,” says Robert Studer, a member of the B.C. design collective Bark that dreamed up the idea. “We'd love the ATC to be Canada's icon — not the log cabin that was at the Turin Olympics.”
As two freshly minted graduates of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design wrestle open furniture flat-packs and sort through screws to set up the ATC, Mr. Studer points out the cutting-edge work of 50 Canadian companies that are crammed into the small space.
Some of them specialize in eco-sensitive materials, some in low energy use, some in self-sufficiency technologies. Others know how to create beauty and functionality in tiny spaces.
The wooden slats that cover the deck and interior floor are larch (also known as tamarack), a wood that is honey-hued, hardy and grows a lot faster than fir or cedar. It is plentiful in all of Canada's boreal forests and has been underutilized because consumers don't know about it, Mr. Studer says.
The walls and ceiling are made of strawboard, which comes from wheat. “Why clear-cut our forests when we can clear-cut our wheat fields?”
The light fixtures are LED or low-watt halogen, bathroom and kitchen faucets are low-flow, and the bed linens (the cabin sleeps four on a Murphy bed and a fold-out couch) are hemp, a fibre that is strong, fast-growing and has thrown off the stigma of being associated with marijuana smoking.
There's soft seating made from paper and a door made from corrugated plywood.
When the ATC was shown in Calgary and Vancouver last fall, “people couldn't believe these designs were coming from Canada,” Mr. Studer says, and that's a big problem for Canadian companies. “You have to build a level of confidence before consumers will buy your product.”
Bark's aim is to increase Canada's “cultural currency” by promoting the things it's creating now rather than in the past.
“There are things that are very contemporary in Canada — like the Blackberry. Why are they not promoted as part of our cultural currency?” he asks.
“We think it's funny that Americans are dumb enough to think we live in igloos, but in fact the joke's on us. We haven't told them anything else.”
There will be a Blackberry on the coffee table in the ATC, and show-goers will also be able to listen to Canadian music and leaf through Canadian art books.
After it leaves Toronto, the ATC is bound for Ottawa, then Atlanta. An Asian tour is in the works, and Bark hopes to show the cabin in London and New York in the next four years.
Although the ATC is a prototype and not currently for sale, the companies involved in equipping it may well decide to mass produce it, Mr. Studer says.
“It's been done so well that people think it's a product and they want to buy it.”
If they do, the container-home will have come a long way from its roots as a mobile field hospital or command post for military and emergency operations.
I think this is very cool, check out the link for a pic
