An Ark for Prince Edward Island
In 1974, the provincial and federal governments invited the Cape Cod-based New Alchemy Institute to construct a demonstration on Prince Edward Island of “a new commitment to living lightly on the earth.” The resulting Ark for Prince Edward Island, designed in partnership with Solsearch Architects of Cambridge MA, was an innovative “bioshelter” offering a fully self-sufficient living environment for a family of four, providing for all food and energy needs, managing all wastes, and enabling a new and symbiotic relationship between its inhabitants and the ecosystem of their home.
Environmentally-conscious “ecological architecture” projects such as the Ark emerged in force in the 1970s, in response to a number of social trends including the counterculture youth movements of the 1960s, the international events and activism leading to the first “Earth Day” in 1970, the OPEC oil crisis of 1973-78, and lingering fears of atomic destruction fed by the Cold War. Beneath these surface drivers lurk more long-standing cultural forces, including the tension between the modernist drive toward globalizing social and technological “progress,” and anti-modernist nostalgia for tradition, place, and customary social order. 1970s ecological architecture arose from the counterculture, and prior to the OPEC oil crisis was met with indifference by the ruling architectural and political cultures.
The Ark was remarkable for its creative collaboration between official culture, local culture and the counterculture. The New Alchemists drew upon years of living experiments carried out at their farmstead on Cape Cod, part of a loose network of explorations around the world in “appropriate technology” and alternative lifestyles. Solsearch Architects brought a synthesizing spatial vision to the assembly of techniques and ecosystems. Prince Edward Island offered a hospitable environment in its commitment to alternative development pathways and a “Small is Beautiful” mindset; its recently formed “Institute for Man and Resources” promised a home-grown partner for dissemination of the Ark’s vision and techniques. The province provided the site, and was instrumental in securing funding and support for the Ark from the Canadian federal government’s Department of Urban Affairs and Environment Canada’s Advanced Concepts unit.
The Ark deployed many then-experimental technologies that remain emblems of sustainable design today: solar heating with mass heat storage, a high-efficiency wood stove, a wind turbine generator, composting toilets, and a passive solar agri/aquaculture greenhouse. It embodied design approaches that were being explored in numerous environmental building experiments of the era, including passive solar orientation, superinsulation of walls and roof, and minimizing of exterior surface and edges. What sets the Ark apart from other sustainable architecture projects, of the 1970s and of today, is a commitment to transforming the lifestyle enabled by the building. Most green building seeks to mitigate the negative impacts of buildings and the lifestyle they support, but accepts without question the lifestyles themselves. The Ark proposed a new relationship between humanity and nature, drawing upon the experiments in living of the1970s counterculture.
A broad spectrum of society assembled at Spry Point in the fall of 1976 for the Ark’s opening, including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, PEI Premier Alex Campbell, Whole Earth Catalog compiler Stewart Brand, and hundreds of individuals from PEI’s then-burgeoning counterculture settlements and the neighboring traditional communities. Over the next several years, thousands more would visit the Ark – tourists and locals, architecture students and appropriate technology advocates – drawn by the Ark’s living vision of a beautiful and meaningful collaboration of humanity with nature. Numerous projects were built in emulation of aspects of the Ark approach. A decade and a half after its demolition, the Ark remains a touchstone for many, a memory of a vision of a compelling sustainable future.
Four decades on, humanity faces many of the same environmental challenges addressed by the Ark, though now with a greater sense of the urgency of the problems, a reduced sense of individual and community agency to tackle them, and an expectation of diminished lifestyles and human possibilities. The Ark offers an alternative approach to meeting a challenging future: a spirit of critical hope, embodying adventure and possibility, with creative collaboration between science and society, and among governments, communities and individuals. The story of the Ark for Prince Edward Island is the story of a compelling road not (yet) taken, offering lessons and inspiration for meeting our present-day environmental challenges.
sm – 2016.07.25
