I thought SDW's readers might like to daydream a little with me and read about the possibilities a community can achieve through a little vision and collective action. Then, it dawned on me that this article was written by the same Chris Turner, author of Geography Of Hope, that was spotlighted here on SDW a few days ago.Coincidence? I think not...
So, sit back, read the article, and imagine the future we could achieve if we had some equally visionary pioneers here in Windsor.
Beyond buzzwords in Banff.
Going green is often corporate-speak for one-off tree-planting campaigns or buildings with energy-efficient light bulbs. But sustainability can be a guiding philosophy as radical and transformative as democracy was to the last century - and one developer in the Rocky Mountains is putting that thinking into action
By CHRIS TURNER
Saturday, October 20, 2007
BANFF, ALTA. -- The Old Crag Cabin has stood in downtown Banff for pretty much as long as there has been a town. It went up in 1890, not long after the first railway track was laid through the Bow Valley - a simple, elegant structure on Bear Street, built in the same corner-post log style as the Hudson's Bay Company trading posts.
At some point in the 1970s, however, the building that once gave a roof to the town newspaper that remains its namesake was encased in yellowish wood panelling and passersby would be forgiven for failing to notice it at all. Bear Street had become a dowdy retail strip - a couple of blocks of everyday services running parallel to glitzy Banff Avenue, but as distant in function as the laundry room from the presidential suite at the Banff Springs hotel. The Crag Cabin, a victim of a quick-buck tourist town's sloppy modernization, wore the street's neglect like a cheap, out-of-date suit.
But the cabin's fate began a dramatic reversal when a local property developer called Arctos & Bird bought it and a handful of surrounding properties in the late 1990s. Its principal, Peter Poole, not only planned to preserve the old cabin according to restrictive covenants on the land, he saw it as the centrepiece of a much broader renewal - an effort to bring truly sustainable development to a mountain town that had grown so rich on its natural beauty that it was on the verge of forgetting that a pretty view was not the same as a healthy ecosystem.
Sustainability is too often used as a buzzword, a bit of corporate-speak to describe the cosmetic tree-planting campaigns of relentless fossil-fuel burners. But Mr. Poole and his team embraced the deeper meaning of the word: Their redevelopment of the Crag Cabin property - which came to be known as Bison Courtyard - demonstrates the concept's full import as a baseline organizing principle.
They understand that sustainability is as vital as the clean air we breathe, and it has the power to be as disruptive to this century as democracy was to the one just past. When it is done right, sustainability lays the foundations for the institutions a healthy society needs and the way of life to which free people aspire. And it can begin from something as humble as democracy's huddled masses - a tired old relic of a cabin, for example.
CRADLE TO CRADLE
The Old Crag Cabin was built in a "pavilion" style - with all four sides designed to be exposed - so Mr. Poole wanted it to stand as the circumnavigable core of a courtyard showcasing the national park's exquisite natural environment. He also wanted to bring the cultural riches of the Banff Centre downtown and supply the town with a bakery. In short, he wanted something far more than a basic commercial strip.
He began by commissioning designer William McDonough, one of the world's most influential green architects. His other work includes landmark corporate headquarters for Ford, the Gap and Google - and he brought to Banff a sort of condensed version of his hyper-efficient, waste-free design philosophy.
Intended as a pointed riposte to sustainability's more modest ambitions, Mr. McDonough calls his approach "cradle to cradle." His buildings don't just aim to reduce occupants' ecological impact to zero, they also regenerate their environment; he believes human enterprise can be not only sustainable, but also restorative. And this vision has made Bison Courtyard more than a mere preservation project.
An elegant, $10-million multi-use complex, it forms a horseshoe of blond wood, local limestone and triple-paned glass around Crag Cabin, with notches carefully inserted in its roofline to provide postcard views of the area's most prominent peaks. The courtyard also has a large garden of native plants fed by rainwater (which also flushes the building's toilets) and indigenous greenery on flat sections of the roof that both improve insulation and create a sanctuary for the valley's natural habitat. The Arctos & Bird team celebrated the first owl droppings found amid those plants the way another firm might have toasted the signing of a flagship tenant.
"If you have the privilege of paving over part of the park," says operations director John Harrop, "you should bring the park back in."
"If you have the privilege of paving over part of the park," says operations director John Harrop, "you should bring the park back in."
All told, 92 per cent of the building materials cleared to make way for Bison Courtyard were diverted from landfill, including a significant portion repurposed on-site. This includes one of the two namesake 6,000-year-old bison skulls found during the excavation of the underground parking lot, which greets visitors from a display case in the lobby (the other now resides in Banff's Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum). The complex's energy demand is about 70 per cent less than a conventional building Arctos & Bird manages elsewhere in town.
This, though, is increasingly standard-issue stuff in the green building game, and efficiency, by itself, doesn't demonstrate the full scope of sustainability's promise. What is truly remarkable about Bison Courtyard is its attention to the social side of the equation - its encouragement of countless interactions and collaborations that create not just an impressive structure but a vibrant place. "The multiplier effect," Mr. Harrop calls it, and one way it was created at Bison Courtyard was, ironically, by subtraction.
THEORY IN ACTION
The subtraction in question was applied to the prime restaurant space on the complex's second floor, overlooking Bear Street, which includes a patio with quite possibly the best panoramic view in a town overloaded with world-class vistas.
As part of the design process, the Arctos team researched the average minimum floor space preferred by big-chain restaurants - and then shrunk their space to a size a few hundred square feet smaller. The usual suspects (including a chain of steakhouses owned by media magnate Ted Turner) salivated at the location, but none could find a way to fit into Bison Courtyard.
"We had a lot of chains hanging around our door," Mr. Poole says. "And they would sniff once, twice. Only the boutique restaurateurs would sniff a third time."
"We had a lot of chains hanging around our door," Mr. Poole says. "And they would sniff once, twice. Only the boutique restaurateurs would sniff a third time."
Before long, the husband-and-wife team of Ryan Rivard and Camilla Sherret, former purveyors of top-drawer cheeses in Calgary, came calling with a profile that fit perfectly with Mr. Poole's vision. "He had people waving millions of dollars in his face," Mr. Rivard says, still amazed at his luck. "And he said, 'No, I want mom and pop.' "
Mr. Rivard and Ms. Sherret's initial plan was for an unpretentious downtown boîte where visitors could sample regional produce - "Rocky Mountain comfort food," they called it. Soon, however, sustainability's multiplier effect kicked in, set in motion by a gift from Mr. Poole: Mr. McDonough's green design manifesto Cradle to Cradle.
By the time it opened, Bison Mountain Bistro had tables of reclaimed wood and a pressed-tin bar salvaged from the scrap heap. The general store next to the entrance was stocked with sauces and preserves from the restaurant's own kitchen, alongside artisanal cheeses and cold-pressed organic canola oil.
The kitchen, meanwhile, became a radical, ongoing experiment in gourmet waste reduction. One day not long after the bistro opened, a Saskatchewan bison farmer finished his bison burger with a query for the kitchen: Why waste your money on a few patties or a rib eye or two when you can buy whole animals and save a bundle? The bistro soon became the farmer's biggest customer and now turns out bison onion soup, bison-tail stew and vacuum-packed bison jerky. The chef has also gone literally whole hog - ordering in entire pigs and curing his own prosciutto. What began as a somewhat aesthetic conceit ("Rocky Mountain comfort food") has become a model of efficient regional cuisine.
The rest of the Courtyard's tenants have engaged in similar experiments. The hair salon organizes monthly art shows. The video store donates its late fees to charity. And Wild Flour is not only the first real bakery that Banff has seen in more than a decade, but owner Jenna Dashney has also made it the first to dedicate itself to organic baking. Arctos rewards such efforts with a $2-per-square-foot rebate on rents.
Meanwhile, in the summer and fall, the outdoor courtyard plays host to a small organic produce market and recitals courtesy of the Banff Centre. Bison Mountain Bistro runs pizza nights using an oven specially installed in one wall for just such events.
"I never leave the courtyard," says Ms. Dashney, who rents one of the 10 apartments built into the complex. "If we had a wine shop here, we'd be perfect."
The Courtyard's tenants - several of whom live on-site - cross-pollinate in less tangible ways as well. "It's a very community-minded group of people," says Mr. Rivard, who has been taking advice from Ms. Dashney on how to deepen the green of his restaurant. "My neighbour does give a shit if I use recycled spoons."
It's an incidental detail, to be sure, but the kind that seems to have a way of sorting itself out when the whole project - whether a building in backstreet Banff or a whole civilization - is established on sustainable foundations.
Born of an initially modest effort to restore one of the town's oldest cabins, Bison Courtyard has emerged as possibly the greenest building in the Canadian Rockies, a new civic square for a town sorely lacking such spaces and a magnet for an inspired clique of enlightened merchants who just might change the retail face of Banff.
Calgary journalist Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope, in stores today. His feature appears monthly in Focus.
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