Prince Edward Island, 1976: the Ark

Two years after Warne's house went up in Sweden, a very similar instinct landed at Spry Point, Prince Edward Island. The Ark was built in 1976 by the New Alchemy Institute with Solsearch Architects — David Bergmark and Ole Hammarlund — as an attempt at autonomous life support for a single family in a cold maritime climate.

Greenhouse, house, fish and wind, in one envelope

The building married a working greenhouse to living quarters, with solar algae tanks doing double duty as thermal mass and aquaculture, organic beds under glass, and wind generation on site. The claim being tested was blunt: that a bioshelter could shelter and feed a household year-round in the north, without fossil fuel.

Why it matters here

It opened on 20 September 1976 to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Premier Alex Campbell and Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog — counterculture and officialdom in the same room. And it was built in our weather. Everything else in this series had to be translated to the Maritimes; the Ark started here.

It ran as a demonstration for only a few years before the funding climate changed, and it survives now mostly in archives and exhibitions. The building went; the evidence didn't.