Green Home [antikvár]

? To take possession of space is the first gesture of the living. -Le Corbusier Lot 92 didn't look like much when 1 first saw it in August: an average corner lot in an average subdivision. It was conspicuously empty. The lots on either side already had houses on them. One was a two-storey brick job with a detached double garage, a driveway of loose red gravel and a Japanese garden in the backyard. A sign on its front lawn proclaimed it The Rotary Dream Home; the local Rotary Club had bought the house from Arnold Freure, the subdivision's developer, for $200,000 and was raffling it off as a fund-raiser. Tickets were $ 100. Even as I stood there, a young couple in a white Mazda pulled up in front of the house and stared blankly out at the brick façade. I tried to see the Dream Home through their eyes. It looked very compact. In fact, it looked tiny. The garage was nearly half as big as the house. The other house was only slightly bigger than the Dream Home: a two-storey frame house with white vinyl siding and a black asphalt roof Its lawn had been so hastily laid out that some of the sod was still wrinkled up against the basement wall, like a throw rug in a slippery hall. Between the two houses. Lot 92 was a promise waiting to be fulfilled. It had been raining on and off for weeks—this was the summer of Pin-atubo, the coldest, wettest August in 94 years. Scraped clean of its top-soil, the lot was little more than a pool of clay-coloured water ringed by a fresh, white curb. A sign at the centre called it the site of the Waterloo Region Greenhome and provided a list of benefactors and well-wishers-the Kitchener-Waterloo Home Builders Association, the City of Waterloo, Union Gas, Ontario Hydro, Energy, Mines and Resources Canada. To the right of the sign, a young colt of a maple sapling stood shaking the drizzle off its leaves. It was the only tree I could see anywhere. It had been set there a month ago as part of an official ceremony to launch the Greenhome. Before many months would pass, the sapling would be part of the landscape design of the most advanced, the most energy- efficient, the most commonsensical house ever built in Canada. ? ? The subdivision is called Southwind and is on the outskirts of Waterloo, Ontario. For a long time, Waterloo was known as an insurance