Toxic Homes
for Sale
On a polluted site
in Ottawa, artists create
a dark experiment
What is it that makes Today's Homes so Different,
in cyberillusion and Just
so Appeaiing
— title of collage by British pop artist Richard Hamilton
consumerism Here in this place, the robot's wheels roll effortlessly on a
7

by Erik Windfeld

28

The

Canadian Forum

manicured green turf. It moves through a flat, apparentlyempty landscape in straight lines. Stopping, starting, turning, it lays down a trail of white powder as it inscribes symmetrical shapes — rectangles for the most part — on the
land's surface. Compelled by signals that come to it via
keyboard, cable and air. the robot draws on the ground
what an architect calls the footprint of a building, the outline of a structure as you might see it on a drafting table,
on a computer screen, or hovering above this field.
Together the footprints create an easily discernible
grid, a cluster of shapes, a familiar suburban template. But
this preplanned neighbourhood resembles the Levittown
tradition of housing development m outline only. The field
is real — an industry-contaminated vacant lot just west of
the Parliament Buildings m downtown Ottawa, known

locally as LeBreton Flats — and so are the robot and the
white dust it deposits. But everything else about the project
exists in cyberspace, www land, the Internet.
New Toxic Homes is, to borrow a hackneyed phrase from
a tract housing sales brochure, a planned community with
a difference. If this project is successful it won't exist in
any conventional sense. It is a dark, satirical, artist-created
experiment in cyberillusion and consumerism, conjured
to highlight technology and the ways in which it is changing our experience of the world and our ideas of occupying
space, private property and how we treat the land.
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operated here, including paint factories, gas stations, junk
yards and foundries, to name just a few. These businesses
and a number of residences were cleared in 1962 to make
way for government buildings. For reasons unconnected
to the toxicity, the buildings originally planned for the site
were constructed elsewhere, and while there have been
many proposals for development since, the area has
remained vacant for 35 years.
New Toxic Homes can draw participants from any point
on the globe connected to the Net, but the artists believe it
will be the locals that find resonance in this project. For

With this mix of artists and industry techies,
these ideas can seem conflicting and,
taken together, possibly overly ambitious.

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In this community the robot will be the sole "real"
occupant of the site. It is the only builder, the physical
extension of the online customer, a proxy laying in powder
their claims to the property. Once the robot has completed
its mission (about 40 houses) the subdivision will be finished, yet no homes will have been built in the physical
sense. But in an electronic reality the properties will have
been parcelled out, built on, occupied and owned.
For the half-dozen artists behind the project, New Toxic
Homes "attempts to relocate functional notions of property,
space and colonization in both concrete and digital terms."
What is more "real" when, for example, a businesses "electronic presence" serves more customers (and makes more
money) than that other place with the desk and flush toilets?
When a stack of money in a bank vault remains unmoved
while its electronic representative whips around the world
by the billions in a day? Which currency has the most effect?
Which currency is more real?
The artists have chosen LeBreton Flats for New Toxic

Homes because they say it is typical of many urban areas
in the western economy. The land is abused to the point of
toxicity but also highly valued prime real estate. Originally
a Native hunting ground and then a staging area for
Europeans portaging nearby Chaudiere Falls, LeBreton
Flats takes up more than 60 hectares on a low-lying stretch
of embankment on the south shore of the Ottawa River.
Because of the proximity of the falls and the power they
provided, it became a centre of industry for the logging
town that was Ottawa. The Flats was a thriving neighbourhood, a mix of industry and residence.
The soil beneath the Flats contains more than 80
known pollutants left behind by the various industries that

the folks of the National Capital Region, LeBreton Flats is
contentious. There are many who mourn the loss of the
last community occupying the site, whose destruction
appears all the more unnecessary as the area has remained
essentially untouched since. Any proposed development
over the years has garnered a lot of public attention and
debate. As well, ownership and authority over the site are
labyrinthine, split between the City of Ottawa, the Regional
Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton and the federal government through the National Capital Commission (NCC) —
by far the majority owner. When it comes to the Flats, proprietary emotions tend to run high on all sides.
Borderline Developments is a real corporation set up by a

variety of artists to carry out projects like New Toxic Homes
— though this is their first effort. Artists from two continents, a historian-architect, high-tech wizards and software programmers have come together to create and
administer this project which, by its completion this fall,
will have been a year in the making. The highlight of the
"happening" will take place in August when the group
plans to occupy the Ottawa site along with the robot and —
more typical of a housing development project — a sales
trailer complete with brochures and other traditional hardsell accoutrements.
While much of the hype will precede the occupation
and happen exclusively on the Net, it will be in the trailer
on the site that the artists will be present to demonstrate
and explain the project. As with most joint ventures, each
participant brings a different area of expertise to the
undertaking and as such each has their own ideas of what
New Toxic Homes is about. Indeed, with this mix of artists
and industry techies, these ideas can seem conflicting and,
August 1999

29

taken together, possibly overly ambitious. But the accompanying literature is clear:
The virtual inhabitation of the area as presented by this
project is demonstrative of a new form of presence, one
by which we will increasingly experience our world...
This is a cautionary project with a healthy dose of satire,
one that seeks to demonstrate how we as a species use
our land ... The project will reveal not only the history
of the site, but what sort of futuristic house might be
developed to best withstand the toxins in the soil.
To draw participants into these issues the artists have
tapped into a bit of camp and the extremely powerful
North American myth/dream/capitalistic construct of
home ownership. Through the New Toxic Homes Web site
(www.newtoxichomes.com) during the last half of August,
would-be home buyers surfing the Net will be offered, for
no money down, a chance to buy a previously polluted lot
and the facilities to design a living space with toxins in
mind. Once the lot is selected the new owner is given a
stratum-by-stratum history of the particular location.
Depending on the site's past occupation, the number and
type of toxins in one plot can be quite different from the
area next door.
How the "owners" deal with the toxins in regard to the
design of the home is completely up to them, says architect/historian Scott Weir: "They can deal with it head-on by
incorporating, for example, the use of the toxins as a material part of the house or its operation. Or they can design
the house in such a way that it will protect them from the
effects of the toxins." (They can also choose to ignore the
toxins altogether.) Once the design is complete, the robot
will awaken and proceed to lay out the chosen design. A
camera mounted on the machine allows the participant to
view the process on their computer screen.
"We're not trying to point any fingers," says Weir of the
project. "Part of this effort is to point out the certain fallout
from our current lifestyle — that the toxins in the soil are
its foundation both literal [in this case] and figurative."
Weir goes on to explain that past industries helped produce the economy and the products that allow today's typical North American way of life — as well as the toxic
byproducts. This site is the worst of capitalism: it pushed
out the occupants and destroyed what was there in the
name of progress (this has happened numerous times at
this site as the exposed strata reveals) and left it essentially
uninhabitable. New Toxic Homes asks people to deal with
these issues as they attempt to reinhabit this site and sites
like this one in the future.

30

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Canadian Forum

Weir is part of the Ottawa based artist group Arteng/ne

that has teamed up with a similar group based in Britain,
the Kit Collective, to form Borderline Developments and
produce this project. Where Artengine's mandate is to facilitate and encourage the use of technology in artists' work,
the Kit Collective is concerned with urban landscape and
issues of presence. DX Raiden (an artist pseudonym) of
the Kit Collective explains the connection between the
urban vacant lot and cyberspace: "Both are paradoxical
spaces ... Both can ascribe a different idea of presences."
The vacant lot, as Raiden sees it, is a hole in the urban
narrative, a loss of control by the myth of the city as
ascending nature. Vacant lots are transitory spaces outside
the usual channels of power and authority because they are
unoccupied in the traditional sense. So it is with cyberspace, a space that is outside the usual ideas of the concrete. And yet, says Raiden, "The economy is run in both
[realities] where the production of space is now read digitally and concrete." As such, he claims, all terms of presence have become relative. Combining the lot with the Net
suggests a new community.
However humorous, esoteric and temporary the project, New Toxic Homes may strike a sensitive nerve in
Ottawa. Certainly the site's pollution is no secret to most
Ottawans, but highlighting it in such a public, cheeky
manner, in such detail, may get more attention than the
artists expect. While this is rarely a problem in the production of art, they are concerned that the National Capital
Commission, from which they required and received permission to use the site, may become defensive and somehow compromise the project before it is complete.
And the NCC has every reason to be defensive, as it has
been judged harshly in the past for perceived heavy-handedness in developing this site and others. In addition,
plans have finally been completed and agreed on to
develop the site starting in 2004. Early in the next millennium, construction (the concrete kind) will begin on a
mixed-use community comprising private residences,
common space (a.k.a. parks), office and retail space. Once
complete it will be not unlike what was there more than 30
years ago. Indeed, this time it promises to be a "planned
community with a difference." Meanwhile, the New Toxic
Homes project will continue to exist in cyberspace after its
completion in September, at www.chin.gc.ca
Erik Windfeld in an Ottawa writer and homeowner — in the
concrete sense of the word.
*