The Now House Project: Providing a Model for Recycling WWII-Era Houses
Renovating and ‘re-using’ older homes may be one of the greenest forms of construction. But fixing up an old house tends to be a highly individual endeavor, and the lessons learned while retrofitting a single home are difficult to adapt to larger-scale applications.
In spite of this, Lorraine Gauthier, co-founder of the socially-conscious Toronto design studio Work Worth Doing, has identified a housing type which offers a high degree of consistency across a large number of homes: post-war housing. Post-war homes, built to accommodate returning WWII veterans, are still a part of the landscape throughout Canada and the United States, and many of these aging homes have poor energy performance. By assembling a team of designers and other sustainable building experts to retrofit a single home in the Toronto area (as part of an undertaking known as the Now House™ project), it is hoped that a formula can be created and then applied to literally millions of homes.
