When I was in Winnipeg several weeks ago to deliver a talk at the University of Winnipeg, my cousins took me on a stroll on the frozen Assiniboine River.
It was a crisp, sunny day, and we popped into several warming huts along the way that had been installed as part of an international design competition. One in particular caught our eye. Made of galvanized and painted corrugated steel in bright colours embedded in a snow drift, the hut included tubular openings protruding at various angles through which kids were keeping warm by climbing and laughing and sliding.
As we remarked on it, we heard a man quip that the “flying children” part was unintentional. We turned around, and there was Jason Halter, one of the installers of the hut, who had worked with architect Kevin Weiss’s Weissbau design team on the project – made by Canada Culvert.
Turns out Jason is a fellow Jewish Winnipegger (I too spent my childhood there), who now lives in Toronto, where he runs a design company – with Anita Matusevics – called Wonder Inc. And while the jungle-gym aspect of the hut may have been unforeseen, there is a great deal of ecological intentionality – even infused with Jewish values, it turns out – behind Halter’s own work. As we spoke, I stayed warm in my deep-freeze winter boots, and Jason kept steady on hockey skates, a pair of DJ-style earphones around his neck.
As Jason explained, the warming-hut structure – while itself not actually recycled – gives a nod to his current focus on simple and accessible “adaptive reuse.” One of his latest projects is transforming shipping containers into small homes. Jason is passionate about the environmental possibilities of this – he sees it as an innovative way to develop more affordable housing. He calls it “micro architecture.” With each container costing roughly $2,500, put four together and you’ve got an inexpensive, 1,280-square-foot house. Wonder Inc. works with Stor Stac in Toronto to retrofit the container for domestic use by spraying foam insulation, installing drywall and cutting out relevant openings.
Given that shipping containers are meant to withstand the rough, salty waters of an ocean journey, their high-iron-concentrated steel form is well suited to housing. He explained that the containers naturally turn orange with rust, making this form of architecture a contemporary statement about freezing the passage of time.
Jason’s personal story is also one about the passage of time. His paternal grandmother, Rhoda Lechtzier-Halter, was the first Jewish girl born in Western Canada, in Winnipeg, in 1881. By the time he was born in 1966, there was an active and well-integrated Jewish community in Winnipeg. He, along with many other Jewish friends, attended University of Winnipeg Collegiate, while playing in Jewish hockey leagues.
Jason describes his work – and his “intensity and creative energy” – as being informed by Jewish values. “Inclusiveness and compassion are what I understand my Jewish roots to be. You always feel like an outsider. The type of work I do is on the fringe.”
Jason might see himself as working on the margins, but that fringe is increasingly coming to find the centre. A September 2014 article in The Atlantic about a university professor in Austin, Texas, endeavouring to live in a retrofitted 36-square-foot dumpster – replete with home decor items – captured the imagination of many on social media, who helped it go viral.
And visit Vipp’s website – the company that’s known for its trash bins – and you’ll see it marketing its “Vipp Shelters” to urban hipsters who want all the design chic that any architecture magazine peddles.
On one foot (or boot or skate), as the old talmudic saying goes, we didn’t get a chance to delve into the entire problem of housing and homelessness. But one could say that this was a good start, helping us enter the Passover season thinking about finding plenty in simplicity.
Mira Sucharov is associate professor of political science at Carleton University.