• 1 The name ECOL was bestowed by inveterate neologist Buckminster Fuller during a visit he made to th (...)

1In the spring of 1972, a small house appeared on the western tip of the island of Montreal, sitting lonely among the 650 hectares of nature reserve, herbarium, arboretum, research farms and laboratories of McGill University’s Macdonald campus. It might have impressed the first-time visitor as a rudimentary, bucolic modernist villa. Organized by a gridded 100mm module, the dwelling’s three-square plan placed mirrored, orthogonal timber-panel and concrete-block pavilions adjacent to an open-sided paved area. A single corrugated roof sheltered the pavilions, which were flanked by a fiberglass cubicle, the tall stalk of a wind-power generator, and an array of small solar-powered devices. It was an unlikely avatar for progressive housing design. However, from its well-heeled, though isolated, institutional setting, the house was promoted as a prototype for global low-cost, self-help housing. Built by McGill University’s Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG), the house was called ECOL.1

• 2 “Research Overview,” URL: https://mchg.ca/about/index.html. Accessed 30 March 2023.
• 3 An excellent snapshot of the diverse, complex landscape of professional, development-oriented buil (...)

2For approximately fifty years, the MCHG has worked on what it describes as the “human settlement problems of the poor.”2 The group was founded by Colombian architect and UN consultant Alvaro Ortega in 1970. ECOL was one of its earliest projects, and the establishing phase of the MCHG became referred to as the “ECOL Operation.” The group tested new materials, technologies, and self-building practices developed by Ortega and his students, whose primary goal was to devise low-cost housing technologies and technological transfers for so-called “developing countries.” The ECOL Operation agenda played out largely through a series of experimental houses, with associated student dissertations and publications. ECOL was the initiating and most prominent project, while an unbuilt ECOL II, proposed for the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat 1), can be taken as the closing marker of the MCHG’s ECOL Operation phase. This phase situated the MCHG among the myriad forms in which architects and other built environment professions engaged with the vast project of post-World War II “development.” More specifically, it connected the group to a global array of research and training programs that had emerged to consolidate and legitimate architectural and planning expertise in development assistance.3

• 4 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation: Ec (...)
• 5 Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini (eds.), Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 O (...)
• 6 Lee Stickells, “Little living labs: 1970s student design-build projects and the objects of experim (...)

3The resourceful, alchemical experimentation of the MCHG’s early work was distinctive. For example, industrial drainage pipes were repurposed as modular roof sheeting; molten sulfur was used to cast mortar-less concrete blocks. Constructional ingenuity and frugality blended with concerns for environmental impacts and user autonomy in an approach described by the group as “building ecologically.”4 That self-characterization makes some sense of ECOL’s subsequent historiography. The house was strongly connected with experimental energy-efficient design that emerged in the context of the 1973 global oil crisis, and the MCHG’s accompanying pamphlets situated within a parallel alternative design publishing scene.5 The group’s foundations in student-led research have been framed within the distinctive educational development of design-build projects from the late 1960s onward into the 1970s, while its self-building materials and systems research has also been explored as a contribution to the complex field of 1970s development aid.6 Telling the story of the MCHG and its ECOL Operation projects is not straightforward—the group worked on the borders of university-based architectural research and teaching, the ecological and alternative design scenes, international development, counterculture, and settler colonial industrial regimes. This paper returns to its earliest phase, tracing disparate elements—objects, actors, publications, institutional networks, funding sources, representational techniques—enrolled in assembling the MCHG’s prototype house projects and shaping their outcomes.

• 7 Sebastiaan Loosen, Viviana D’Auria, Hilde Heynen, “The city as a housing project,” op. cit. (note (...)
• 8 Arindam Dutta, Ateya Khorakiwala, Ayala Levin, Fabiola López-Durán, and Ijlal Muzaffar, “Introduct (...)

4The paper seeks to contextualize the MCHG among the disparate constellation of university-based educational and research initiatives that emerged through architecture’s entanglement with international development agendas. Loosen, d’Auria and Heynen have described the diversity and growth of such programs through the 1960s, and noted a relative autonomy for academic research and teaching programs in regard to the professionalised discourse of intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and World Bank; many programs were kindled, as they put it “more by particular individuals and contingencies than by a firmly decisive policy.”7 One aim of the paper is to give further nuance to the historiography through approaching the MCHG’s “ECOL Operation” as one of the many institutional gambits made within the mercurial professional field connecting architecture, education and the development aid economy. Like much of the work in the recent essay collection Architecture in Development, an “artefactual politics” is emphasized and (per Langdon Winner) serious attention paid to ways in which the MCHG’s material architectural experimentation was connected with realizing particular “forms of life.”8 The paper speaks to the subsequent yields, felicities and ironies of the knowledge circuits that emerged through the MCHG’s practically-oriented research and building program, and their spillover effects beyond the Cold War complex of intergovernmental organizations and development agendas. The group’s early operations give cause to rethink some typical understandings made of actors and lines of transmission involved in postwar development projects and networks, such as the developing world as the site for practical, local application of expert knowledge held by foreign, developed world expertise. Tracking the building of ECOL instead emphasizes the hybridity and contingency at work in particular configurations of the architecture-international development nexus, where, it will be suggested, the architecture of development might even serve countercultural communards.

• 9 Norbert Schoenauer, “History,” unpublished manuscript, n.d. URL: https://www.mcgill.ca/architectur (...)
• 10 Tom Holbert, Politics of Learning, Politics of Space: Architecture and the Education Shock of the (...)
• 11 Sebastiaan Loosen, Viviana D’Auria, Hilde Heynen, “The city as a housing project,” op. cit. (note (...)

5In 1970, Alvaro Ortega was appointed to McGill University’s School of Architecture as a research associate in ecology and building, during a leave of absence from United Nations- sponsored roles.9 This appointment marked the beginning of the MCHG. 1970 was also designated by the UN as “International Education Year.” In subsequent years, states grappling with new post-colonial formations and striving toward economic stability became the global laboratories for projects of educational, technological and architectural innovation.10 Growing soft-power connections were being established worldwide between development and education policy, and with an eye toward the contemporary figuration of the “Third World.” Already by the early 1960s, a network of institutions catering to development studies for architects and planners had developed. In a basic sense, then, the MCHG fit with what had become an established pattern of university-based training programs across Europe and North America that catered to mid-career professionals from “developing countries” and were often initiated by staff with a track record as UN advisors.11

• 12 Giaime Botti, “Geographies for Another History: Mapping the International Education of Architects (...)
• 13 Alvaro Ortega, Prearquitectura del bienestar, Bogota: Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad de los (...)
• 14 Ibid., p. 20. Breuer supported Ortega’s successful application for a 1950 Guggenheim Fellowship. M (...)

6The concerns and methods of the MCHG, and the expertise that attached to its early activities, were strongly underpinned by Ortega’s transnational professional subjectivity. He was part of a wave of twentieth-century Colombian architects who had been educated overseas and who embraced modernism.12 The onset of World War II interrupted Ortega’s plans to study architecture in Paris, but three decades before founding the MCHG, he completed his initial architecture degree at McGill University with a thesis titled "Study on Affordable Housing."13 Then, in 1945, he joined the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, studying as a Wheelwright Fellow under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He continued working for Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann at General Panel Corporation and maintained a longstanding friendship with Breuer.14 Ortega subsequently became a standard-bearer for prefabrication, rationalization, and modular coordination in housing projects across the Global South. He argued:

• 16 Idem, Prearquitectura del bienestar, op. cit. (note 13), p. 22.
• 17 Adrián Gorelik, “Pan-American routes: a continental planning journey between reformism and the cul (...)
• 18 Regin Bittner, “Preface,” in Mya Berger and Leticia M. Brown (eds.), A Concrete for the “Other Hal (...)
• 19 Ayala Levin, “Beyond Global vs. Local: Tipping the Scales of Architectural Historiography,” ABE Jo (...)
• 20 Rybczynski suggests Ortega made a deal with the director of McGill’s school of architecture, John (...)

7Ortega spent significant time working as a consultant for UN- and US-backed economic development and affordable housing programs across South and Central America. His work focused on the development of experimental construction materials and techniques contributing to the standardization, prefabrication and rationalization he so valued. During his professional life he held positions in organizations including the Centro Interamericano de Vivienda (CINVA), one of the US Government’s Cold War-era organizations that oversaw the US-aided development projects; the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA); the United Nation’s Center for Human Settlements (UNCHS, a.k.a. UN-Habitat) and the Organization of American States (OAS).16 Ortega’s activities across continents and appointments—scholarships, architectural practice, study tours, and technical assistance programs—are symptomatic of the multi-directional knowledge transfers that Adrián Gorelik describes as the “Pan-American routes” of inter-American planning thinking, and Ortega’s career spanned their shifting flows.17 His career also straddled a transition period between the material experimentation of functionalist housing experiments dating from early twentieth-century modernism and a post-World War II international modernism, shaped by the social dynamics and geopolitics of the Cold War, independence movements and decolonization; a period in which it has been suggested that “modern designers adopted a new perspective, moving away from the sociology of housing towards an anthropology of living conditions.”18 Ayala Levin’s term “intermediary architect” describes a class of highly educated professionals in this period, trained in postcolonial contexts, positioned between the developed and the developing worlds, and whose roles were not reducible to passive mediation.19 The term captures the complicated positioning established by Ortega’s transnational personal and professional trajectories. Ortega had already garnered twenty years’ experience of this kind when he initiated the MCHG.20 His position was never simply foreign or local, arch-modernist or appropriate technologist, insider or outsider, and this background was reflected in the founding of the MCHG. The intermediary dimension of Ortega’s experiences strongly conditioned the agenda and the first phase of activities of the MCHG graduate program.

• 21 Kim Förster, Geneviève Depelteau, Michèle Curtis interview with Witold Rybczynski. Arthur Acheson, (...)
• 22 Ortega established the group alongside students Witold Rybczynski (Canada), Samir Ayad (Egypt), Wa (...)
• 23 David B. Mansur, “A Sense of Mission,” in Housing a Nation: Forty Years of Achievement=Un toit pou (...)
• 24 How exactly the CMHC came to fund the MCHG is not clear, but it is not unsurprising. The CMHC was (...)
• 25 For example: Minimum Cost Housing Group, Samir Ayad and Witold Rybczynski, The Problem Is, Montrea (...)
• 26 Charles Levi, Canada: The Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, Research Report, Cambridge (...)
• 27 John Boon, Intermediate Housing Technology Within Community Development, op. cit. (note 25).
• 28 That this was not unusual in the various 1970s educational programs and centers of expertise that (...)
• 29 Hannah le Roux, “CINVA to Siyabuswa: The unruly path of global self-help housing,” in Vikramaditya (...)

8The early personnel, funding, and organization of the MCHG reinforced its intermediary character, beginning with the first intake of a handful of students. Witold Rybczynski had grown up in Canada and received his undergraduate architecture degree from McGill University; he became the MCHG’s very first student. Rybczynski’s decision to join Ortega’s new program reflected a desire to strengthen architecture’s social relevance and a broad interest in “Third World” — “like most young people I was idealistic, so the idea of housing for the needy appealed to me.”21 Others, coming from postcolonial contexts, such as Egypt and Pakistan, embodied the global market that had emerged for development-oriented professional education.22 The MCHG’s financial organization was similarly mixed. However, there was no direct sponsorship from the UN or other intergovernmental development organizations. The seed money came from a Canadian national government body—the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The primary role of the CMHC was to promote home ownership in Canada and develop financial systems to foster a Canadian mass homebuilding program.23 However, it also funded university research and provided extensive support to planning and architectural studies of varying kinds.24 Acknowledgments made in early MCHG student dissertations and the group’s first publications, as well as archived project correspondence, shows that the CMHC funding was directed toward student fellowships and project costs.25 Some students received individual support from the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (CSFP). The CSFP had long been considered a form of development aid from older to newer members of the Commonwealth (being administered first by Canada’s External Aid Office, and then by the Canadian International Development Agency). However, by 1970 the CFSP was administered by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and more firmly positioned as an exchange program—not to be confused, in the words of the AUCC’s Awards office director, “with other programmes which were designed solely to assist developing countries.”26 Specific project funding was also received. For example, John Boon’s dissertation project received a grant from the Special Assignment and Review Group, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.27 The MCHG’s grounding in Ortega’s modernist training and international development experience, its diverse membership and embodied expertise, and its precarious status as a fledgling degree program with varyingly focused funding, suggests the ECOL Operation as an uneven, tactical educational initiative, reflecting contingent conditions and aspirations, rather than as strategic knowledge production.28 This dimension is key to the following narrative; as Hannah le Roux has suggested, attention to “incomplete projects, resistances, and inconclusive results” is critical to more properly accounting for the histories of Global Modernism.29

• 31 Ernst. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, London: Blon (...)

10Alvaro Ortega’s professional enthusiasms can be read in the agenda outlined by Boon. However, the strong imprint of the developing “Appropriate Technology” (AT) movement was also evident in the MCHG’s approach to questions of scale, production, and user autonomy. Inspired by E.F. Schumacher’s “intermediate technology” idea and his 1973 best-seller Small Is Beautiful, the AT movement criticized international development models built on top-down transfer of capital-intensive technology from industrialized nations to developing countries.31 Schumacher described intermediate technology (his preferred term) as:

• 33 Peter Ward, “Self-Help Housing Ideas and Practice in the Americas” in Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence (...)
• 34 Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, London: Thames & Hudso (...)
• 35 Katie Willis, Theories and Practices of Development, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, Abingdon, (...)
• 36 Paul Streeten with Shahid Javed Burki, Mahbub ul Haq, Norman Hicks and Frances Stewart, First Thin (...)

11The disposition of the AT movement toward simple, inexpensive and small-scale technologies chimed with the “basic needs approach” emerging in international development circles.33 The “top-down” economic development theories of the 1950s were rethought through the 1970s, via an anthropological turn that scrutinized the distribution of the benefits of growth, rather than seeking economic growth as an end in itself. This perspective molded appropriate technology and design movements—famously proselytized in Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World polemic.34 The latter technique tended to prioritize decentralized decision-making at the local level and, as development scholar Katie Willis has noted, was inclined toward “greater research on labour-intensive production techniques that were appropriate for small scale activities.”35 AT and basic-needs approaches were aligned in seeing self-reliant modes of dwelling construction as a scaffolding for occupants’ economic self-reliance.36

• 37 Samir Ayad, The Development of Alternative Uses for Locally-Available Building Materials, Particul (...)
• 38 The Brace Research Institute collaborated with the Canadian Hunger Foundation (CHF) to produce the (...)
• 39 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)

12The MCHG’s own efforts reflected this shifting disciplinary context, and the AT stance in particular. The early work of the group spelled out the ambitions toward small-scale technologies and self-reliance. Samir Ayad’s 1971 dissertation was titled “The Development of Alternative Uses for Locally-Available Building Materials, Particularly Binding Agents, in Order to Decrease the Building Cost and Increase the Quality of Construction in Self-Built Housing.”37 John Boon’s 1974 dissertation makes explicit reference to Schumacher in its title: “Intermediate Housing Technology within Community Development.” The group also often worked closely with the Brace Research Institute (BRI)—a well-established AT group in McGill University’s Faculty of Engineering. The BRI was known internationally for its work on solar energy utilization, particularly solar distillation, and for the development of wind turbines.38 Its devices were attractive to the MCHG and the acknowledgements in MCHG publications and dissertations show that BRI researchers often provided hands-on assistance in MCHG projects.39 ECOL was created as the key vehicle to bring together all the ideas and technologies being explored and adopted by the MCHG.

• 40 Mortar-less sulfur concrete blocks were seen as a cheap, easily reproducible construction element (...)
• 41 Minimum Cost Housing Group, Samir Ayad and Witold Rybczynski, The Problem Is, op. cit. (note 25), (...)
• 42 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)
• 43 Peter Ward, “Self-Help Housing Ideas and Practice in the Americas,” op. cit. (note 33).
• 44 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)

13In practice, ECOL was a bricolage of newly developed building materials and systems, adapted technologies and off-the-shelf products. The transformation of molten sulfur into mortar-less, interlocking concrete blocks and the repurposing of industrial drainage pipes into modular roof sheeting were key interests of Ortega.40 Sulfur concrete was a particular and distinctive focus for the MCHG early on; the group argued that its easy availability (especially in many developing countries), low cost, and relatively simple working techniques made it an attractive material for minimum cost housing.41 Walls for one of the house’s two rooms were constructed from sulfur concrete blocks. Sulfur concrete paving blocks were used for the floor throughout, and a corrugated asbestos roof spanned across the two enclosed rooms as well as an open workspace between them. The second room used the Pan-Abode building system—a patented Canadian process of prefabricated timber construction used in complete pre-cut houses. A rainwater tank and solar still fed the Buckminster Fuller-inspired misting shower (which used a Brazilian-built electric shower head), flushed the toilet and filled a plastic camping basin for hand and dishwashing. A wind power generator supplied by the BRI provided a small amount of power for an aerator (part of the waste-recycling system) and some lights. Cooking was done with two solar cookers—one built by the BRI as a prototype for developing countries and the other made by following the instructions in a Boy Scout pamphlet.42 The combination of all these elements as ECOL was pitched as a contribution to forms of aided self-help housing. By the early 1970s, the program had caught the eye of organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.43 The ECOL Operation—a book published by the MCHG documenting ECOL—emphasizes, for example, that the house was designed to avoid “large investments, technical know-how or expensive machinery” in favor of locally available materials and self-build construction by the dweller.44 However, the MCHG’s material assembly of ECOL on its Montreal site created knowledge flows and infrastructures that complicated the ostensible orientation of the ECOL Operation toward developing world clients.

• 45 Arthur Acheson was a MCHG student and Elizabeth was his wife. They were both from Northern Ireland

14ECOL offered a polemical enactment of the possibilities for self-sufficient, low-cost housing. Young Irish students Arthur and Elizabeth Acheson kept a diary of their trial occupation of the house, which reflected not only on its technical performance but also the pleasures and constraints of the lifestyle it afforded.45 They struggled a little with its dribbling, low-pressure shower fitting, learned to allow plenty of time for meals prepared with a solar cooker, monitored the aerobic waste recycling system, and celebrated Arthur’s 23^rd birthday (they wrote): “ecologically camping, eating, drinking wine.” Their domestic routines gestured toward ECOL as the setting for lives characterized by voluntary simplicity, technological self-sufficiency and ecological attunement.

• 46 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)
• 47 The completion of the house was celebrated on 8 September 1972 with a party involving “more than 3 (...)
• 48 Ibid., p. 90.
• 49 “Sulphur helps to build low-cost housing,” Design Journal, July 1972, p. 283; “Concrete proposal f (...)

15The house was a strange pantomime of ecological Third World living. Its consumers could not really be said to be the “underprivileged peoples” cast as the recipients of its low-cost housing model.46 The visitors we might imagine strolling around the model home nibbling on shish-kufta at its opening were largely drawn from the McGill group’s architectural, industrial and NGO networks.47 The guest list included representatives from Canada’s International Development Research Centre and the Intermediate Technology Group, reflecting the project’s outward orientation. Organizations that had provided funding or materials for the ECOL Operation were also present at the opening—the Canadian Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Sulphur Development Institute of Canada (SUDIC) and Atlas Asbestos. The Atlas Asbestos representative was clearly satisfied with the use of the company’s product and declared himself “impressed with the whole project.”48 The ECOL research program, particularly elements such as the waste sulfur concrete and solar still experiments, also drew the approving attention of mainstream and specialist media such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Harper’s Magazine, New Scientist, and Design Journal (who saw the project as offering “changes in social conditions across the board”).49 The character of these audiences leads us to wonder just who benefited from the architectural experiment.

• 50 World demand for sulfur had steadily increased through the early twentieth century. Cycles of exce (...)
• 51 Samir Ayad, The Development of Alternative Uses for Locally-Available Building Materials, op. cit.(...)
• 52 Robert E. Loov, Alan H. Vroom and Michael A. Ward, “Sulfur Concrete-A New Construction Material,” (...)
• 53 John Boon, Intermediate Housing Technology within Community Development, op. cit. (note 25), p. 43

16The organizational and media attention highlighted certain demands of Canadian industry and government that strongly regulated ECOL’s innovation. One likely key to ECOL’s positive reception was the budding government and commercial interest during the early 1970s in sulfur concrete as a building material.50 When promoting their work, Ortega and his MCHG colleagues tended to emphasize sulfur as a naturally occurring element, helpfully located near areas of housing need. Samir Ayad argued in his 1971 dissertation that “the fact that [sulfur] is locally available in many developing countries makes it a particularly attractive material for minimum cost housing.”51 However, what was perhaps more consequential for the focus on sulfur blocks in the ECOL experiment was the steep increase in the industrial supply of sulfur in the Global North, from the late 1960s onward. The dramatic growth was a by-product of new pollution-reducing processes in gas and crude oil extraction and refining. By 1974, Canada was the world’s largest sulfur exporter and a close second to the United States in total production.52 ECOL’s sulfur concrete experimentation was well-timed and well-placed. The Montreal Sulphur Plant was located in the same city and SUDIC provided ECOL funding. State support for later MCHG building projects, like Saddle Creek Round House (1973) and Maison Lessard (1974), came from different departments—the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs underwrote the former and an Opportunity for Youth grant supported the latter—but both projects also sharply focused on demonstrating the potential of sulfur concrete blocks. Redwater Imperial Oil even donated 25 tons of liquid sulfur for the Saddle Creek house.53 The MCHG’s development of sulfur concrete products was entwined as much with addressing the developed world’s industrial by-products as it was about prioritizing locally available materials in developing countries.

• 54 Pan-Abode homes were established in 1948 to market an interlocking building system of Western Red (...)
• 55 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)
• 56 Support from the Quebec Government sustained the acceptance of risk in asbestos mining and manufac (...)
• 57 Martin Pawley, “Garbage Housing I: Zero Value,” Architectural Design (A.D.), no. 12, 1973, p. 775.
• 58 Myra J. Hird argues that waste is a symptom of ongoing settler colonialism in Canada. She identifi (...)
• 59 “Sulphur helps to build low-cost housing,” op. cit. (note 49), p. 283.
• 60 Hannah le Roux and Gabrielle Hecht, “Bad Earth,” e-flux, August 2020. URL: https://www.e-flux.com/ (...)

17Extending connections with national industries, the western cedar logs of the house’s Pan-Abode timber walling took advantage of Canada’s well-established logging industry.54 Similarly, the asbestos roof system deployed at ECOL took advantage of Quebec’s role as a major global asbestos exporter. Atlas Asbestos supplied the industrial drainage channels that were cut to form the roof sheets. The company also produced a custom-molded, L-shaped, self-supporting asbestos sheet to form the walls of ECOL’s self-contained bathroom unit (which included the rainwater collector, solar still, and an aerobic recycling waste system).55 Atlas Asbestos’ material and financial support for ECOL is especially understandable—in the 1970s, Canada’s asbestos industry was ramping up production and seeking new markets in developing countries (even as the horrific health risks of asbestos were becoming more publicly known).56 Martin Pawley characterised the MCHG’s approach to repurposing these industrial products and waste as “systematized” versus the “traditional bricolage” of developing countries (represented for him by the Kenyan example of a margarine tin turned into a cup).57 That systematized approach, and the tight links of ECOL’s construction elements to Canada’s settler colonial industries of resource extraction, show how the ECOL Operation’s entanglement in local material and knowledge economies was at some distance from the localism projected in its self-help housing rhetoric.58 ECOL was advocated for with principled notions of a “third world housing” model using “self-help together with only technology and components that the non-professional builder is best able to cope with.”59 However, the technologies and components developed by the MCHG and its collaborators were also directly connected to addressing the contemporary opportunities and challenges of North American industry—joining the proliferation of twentieth century experiments re-mining the waste products of mineral extraction. These experiments, Hannah le Roux and Gabrielle Hecht have argued, “generated a patchwork of modular building materials, framed by modernity’s perpetual penchant for scalability, while simultaneously containing its dark consequences.”60

• 61 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)
• 62 Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology: A Global History, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014; “Introduction (...)

18The kind of response ECOL represented to the conditions of North American industrial society was critical to the character and mediation of the project. The group’s manifesto for “12 Ways of Building Ecologically” was published as the introduction to The ECOL Operation. The international development slant of the group’s research is visible in principles such as “Using solar energy to purify polluted or sea-water,” which also invoked the MCHG’s collaborations with groups such as the BRI. The principles also emphasized ways to reduce pollution and utilize industrial waste—the fourth principle, for example, exhorted “using pollution-free wind energy to produce electricity” and the 11^th principle emphasized the conservation of “natural resources” that were “rapidly being depleted by overuse.”61 The highlighting of energy efficiency, pollution reduction, and more environmentally benign technologies in the principles, alongside the MCHG’s connections to North American industry, reinforces how the group’s ecological building ethos was heavily weighted toward addressing the growing anxieties of developed countries in this period. A burgeoning public ecological consciousness in countries such as Canada included greater awareness about the environmental impacts of resource extraction and uncertainty about how to sustain the industrial production underpinning postwar consumer society.62 The strong presence of such concerns in the MCHG’s ecological building principles implicated ECOL in the remaking of Canadian society as much as in the worldwide relief of poverty.

• 63 Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawre (...)
• 64 Colin M. Coates (ed.), Canadian Countercultures and the Environment, op. cit. (note 62), p. 13.
• 65 Carroll Pursell, “Sim Van der Ryn and the Architecture of the Appropriate Technology Movement,” Au (...)
• 66 Adrian Smith, “Environmental Movements and Innovation: From Alternative Technology to Hollow Techn (...)
• 67 “Green Before Green,” Paul-Desmarais Theatre, op. cit. (note 5).
• 68 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)

19ECOL’s technologies, design values, and the lifestyle it projected resonated with broader aspects of the alternative culture of the 1960s and 1970s, such as an emphasis on personal experimentation and the desire for autonomy from the state and its infrastructure. More particularly, ECOL can be related to a counterculture-inflected ecological design movement emerging in the developed world, particularly in North America. The MCHG and its ECOL project offered shelter practices that dovetailed neatly with what environmental historian Andrew G. Kirk has identified as “pragmatic environmentalism.”63 Kirk has described a scene that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living, and saw composting toilets and solar collectors as positive political acts. Kirk’s focus is the West Coast of the United States and the community revolving around the Whole Earth Catalog. However, a similar phenomenon could be found closer to home for the MCHG—Canada experienced its own environmental counterculture that experimented with self-sufficiency and Appropriate Technologies through off-grid living experiments. There were more local countercultural resources in the Canadian Whole Earth Almanac and the Quebec-based Le Répertoire Québécois des outils planétaires.64 The overall enthusiasm for smaller-scale, participatory modes of technology development adapted ideas from the Appropriate Technology movement well beyond the developing countries that were its ostensible target, and often within the settings of architecture schools.65 The postwar university research system was found to be a receptive site for the development and propagation of AT ideas about novel decentralist technologies coupled with decentralist politics.66 Witold Rybczynski recalled that the MCHG students during this period were very much influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s ideas, and were avidly reading Architectural Design and the Whole Earth Catalog. The notion of an autonomous house had an appeal “like a perpetual motion machine.”67 ECOL’s voluntary design primitivism fit with this worldview and was, as Arthur Acheson put it: “common to do-it-yourself, freak geodesics, intermediate technology, the Whole Earth Catalog and our own work.”68

• 69 Maryia Rusak, “A Building Manual” in Mya Berger and Leticia M. Brown (eds.), A Concrete for the “o (...)
• 70 As the 2020 Bauhaus Lab participants found, the sulfur concrete block-making process was much hard (...)
• 71 Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali and Arthur Acheson, The ECOL Operation, op (...)
• 72 The potential sites for ECOL projects were conceived very broadly in many of the early MCHG resear (...)

21The ECOL Operation included a set of building instructions intended to communicate locally-calibrated, accessible building practices to self-builders in developing countries. It also conveyed an ambiguity about the imagined client for the house. Design manuals were becoming a familiar tool for inter-governmental agencies engaged in aided self-help projects. However, as Maryia Rusak has noted, the MCHG effort seems to have served more as a record of the experimental process, and its instructional tone seems misaligned with the likely tacit knowledge and work environment of self-builders in the “underprivileged” context the MCHG conjured.69 The list of tools and instruments suggested for making sulfur blocks, for instance, which includes a concrete mixer, electric melting pots, and a thermocouple, appears to overestimate the resources that will be available to the DIY builder.70 The question of cultural compatibility went further, as the country or region for which ECOL might have been envisaged also remained unclear. The most explicit reference to possible location emerges from the Acheson’s diary, in which on October 12, 1972, Arthur laments “Here we are in a prototype house that is meant for the tropical belt, and Montreal is having the coldest October on the record.”71 Apart from this invocation of tropicality, there is limited evidence of ECOL’s design being calibrated for a specific context. In discussing the materials, techniques, and economics connected with various ECOL components, a range of countries is mentioned, including Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Canada, Greece, Spain, USA. ECOL emerges as a demonstration and test of ideas for unusual construction materials and methods geared toward generic notions of frugality, simplicity and self-sufficiency.72

• 73 The 1979 Directory of Institutions and Individuals Active in Environmentally-Sound and Appropriate (...)
• 74 Stephen Parnell, “Ethics VS Aesthetics: Architectural Design 1965-1972,” field, vol. 4, no. 1, 202 (...)
• 75 Lee Stickells, “Exiting the Grid: Autonomous House Design in the 1970s,” in Paul Hogben and Judith (...)
• 76 “AT Directory, Part 3” “Excreta Treatment,” Architectural Design (A.D.), no. 5, 1975, p. 313. The (...)

22As a manual for building, The ECOL Operation can be more readily imagined as sitting on a bookshelf alongside Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook (1970), Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook (1970), and the Whole Earth Catalog, at one of the many AT communes that had been established by the late 1970s in developed countries. These countercultural laboratories were hungry for the kind of information and guidance on self-sufficient, ecologically-attuned dwelling that the ECOL Operation had developed, in order to fuel their efforts to fundamentally restructure human relations with science and technology.73 ECOL began circulating among this scene through publication in the highly influential Architectural Design (A.D.) which, during the early-1970s, was finding a role for architecture in the new counterculture.74 The very title of Stop the Five Gallon Flush (1973) points to this attunement of the MCHG and the countercultural design scene. Couched as a survey of alternative waste disposal systems to aid “regions where inadequate sanitation is present,” the “five gallon flush” of the book’s title refers to the standard requirement of a 1970s North American flush toilet for five gallons (21 litres) of water for flushing. The reference highlights the survey’s broader relevance for anyone interested in disconnecting from the “developed” world’s industrialized, centralized sewage infrastructures. It connected ECOL particularly to a network of similar exploration in places such as the USA, UK and Australia, involved in testing small-scale, self-sufficient living systems marked by the popularization of ecological and cybernetic thinking, and Appropriate Technology concepts.75 Stop the Five Gallon Flush would be echoed, for example, by Farallones Institute-founder Sim Van der Ryn’s The Toilet Papers (1978)—a DIY guide to waste recycling and water conserving treatment systems. In 1975 A.D. published an “Alternative Technology Directory” that proclaimed, in terms of “Excreta Treatment,” that “The definitive work without doubt is Stop the Five Gallon Flush by Ortega et. al., of the Minimum Cost Housing Group at McGill.”76 Placed in the context of these shared concerns, connections and endorsements, ECOL can be seen as formative for an alternative design movement oriented toward the prefigurative reshaping of First World domesticity.

• 77 Rational Technology Unit 73-4, Report, London: Architectural Association, 1974; Carl Anthony, Jim (...)
• 78 Alain Gerrand, “American Alternatives,” Architectural Design (A.D.), no. 1, 1975, p. 19-25; Forres (...)
• 79 How to Heat Your Swimming Pool Using Solar Energy , [Rev. ed.], Ste. Anne de Bellevue: Brace Resea (...)

23The MCHG’s approach to publishing reinforced the connection with a countercultural eco-design scene. The group’s publication style was born of the emphasis on efficiency and self-reliance instilled by Ortega, but also owed a lot to the methods of the countercultural media flourishing in North America at the time. The cheap paper stock, cartoonish illustrations, step-by-step photography and an accessible, often humorous, do-it-yourself tone of The ECOL Operation were all typical of the period’s flourishing alternative publishing scene and its arenas for nonconformist dialogues (the Whole Earth Catalog being the most well-known example). Design advice for development aid contexts was often delivered via publication programs shaped and targeted for those contexts (such as Yona Friedman’s work at the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance (CCSK)), but the MCHG’s work gained its profile largely through the media circuits and networks of an alternative architectural culture. MCHG publications were reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog and A.D., and appeared on reading lists in architectural schools where radical ecological design experimentation had gained a foothold, such as the Architectural Association’s “Rational Technology” program and a UC Berkeley “Natural Energy Design” course (convened by Sim Van der Ryn).77 They circulated among the designers of experimental houses associated with those schools, such as the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, the Ouroboros House in Minnesota, and the Autonomous House in Sydney. Broader audiences—professional, activist, student—were reached through publication or review in magazines such as Architectural Design (A.D.), Undercurrents, and the AIA Journal, and books such as Radical Technology and Energy, Environment and Building.78 An awareness of the interest in self-sufficient technologies outside the development aid context is highlighted by a 1973 pamphlet published by the MCHG’s collaborators in building ECOL—the BRI. How to Heat Your Swimming Pool Using Solar Energy addresses a topic unlikely to elicit much interest in the poorest parts of the planet. Clearly, it was calibrated for a more affluent D.I.Y. audience.79 The networks through which the MCHG publications travelled firmly situate ECOL and its influence in a broader mosaic of ecological design experimentation. The AT approach, waste materials, low-cost do-it-yourself techniques and refashioned vernacular technologies were being focused on reimagining dwelling in the “advanced” consumerist societies of the Global North.

• 80 Vikram Bhatt, “The User and the House Building Process,” op. cit. (note 49), p. 48.
• 81 “Green Before Green,” Paul-Desmarais Theatre, op. cit. (note 5).
• 82 Vikram Bhatt, “The User and the House Building Process” op. cit. (note 5), p. 47.
• 83 Witold Rybczynski, Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology, New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1 (...)

24ECOL was the product of a discrete period in the life of the MCHG. After only a few years in operation, the group’s projects shifted direction. In 1973, Ortega moved on from McGill University to work for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Organization of American States (OAS). Witold Rybczynski—the MCHG’s first student—became the MCHG director. The group continued to develop experimental houses, and the new projects were still framed as developing low-capital, labor-intensive, self-building approaches. However, they were less clearly directed toward international development contexts. In 1973, the group collaborated with members of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, in Alberta, on “The Round House at Saddle Lake.” A small pavilion (to serve as a community building) was constructed as an extension of earlier MCHG research on using interlocking sulfur concrete blocks as a low-budget, self-help building component. It was seen by the group as “a vehicle to transfer sulfur technology to the Indians.”80 During 1974 and 1975, the group engaged in building Maison Lessard, a four-bedroom house intended to serve as an orphanage at St. François du Lac (a small village northeast of Montreal). Again, sulfur concrete blocks were used in a co-building process, this time involving local school students. Rybczynski has suggested that, while before 1973 the focus for the MCHG was “Third World” applications, the Energy Crisis of that year changed the significance of their projects.81 The emphasis in the post-1973 projects remained on a vision of empowering communities with critical housing needs, which correlated with ECOL’s initial international development focus. However, it is also clear they became more directly responsive, and applied, to local conditions—building for and with specific communities rather than imagined clients. Vikram Bhatt, in his 1975 dissertation “The User and the House Building Process,” which documented the designing and building of Maison Lessard, argued it was “dangerous” to advocate self-help housing for developing countries without “studying their context in detail.”82 Witold Rybczynski—MCHG director at the time, and Bhatt’s supervisor—was perhaps of a similar mind. Certainly, by 1980, he had turned away from the kind of development-oriented AT approaches explored in ECOL, describing them in his book Paper Heroes as “well-intentioned, but ill-informed imposition from outside.”83 Bhatt and Rybczynski’s critiques, alongside the existing connections to Canadian funding bodies and industries, makes sense of the MCHG’s shift to direct collaborations with Canadian communities.

• 84 Letter to W.R, Director of MCHG, from Minister of State, Urban Affairs, Canada, July 3, 1975. Mini (...)
• 85 Proposal for Ecol Operation demonstration in Vancouver 1974-1975, Minimum Cost Housing Group Fonds (...)
• 86 Pawley had been investigating the potential of what he called “Garbage Housing” since the beginnin (...)
• 87 Proposal for RECOVER, RECYCLE, REUSE: A Demonstration Project as part of Habitat Forum during the (...)
• 88 The project was conducted for the Philippines’ National Housing Authority (NHA) and the United Nat (...)
• 89 In 1977, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a small project was undertaken for the Ministry of Pub (...)
• 90 See, for example, How the Other Half Lives—a three volume study carried out by the MCHG more than (...)

25By the mid-1970s, the MCHG’s international self-help housing ambitions, materials and techniques had been demonstrated through ECOL, while Saddle Creek and Maison Lessard were locally-inscribed iterations of the group’s approach. A second ECOL project bookended the group’s first phase. Designed in 1976, ECOL II was pitched as “the final phase of the ECOL Operation” and looked to integrate some of the MCHG’s various concepts into a low-energy house for North American suburbia. The proposal was made to the Government of Canada’s Urban Demonstration Program (UDP), which planned to exhibit selected projects at Habitat I. The envisaged project mirrored ECOL—it was to be built on McGill University land and occupied, to test its integrated systems—but the stated focus had shifted dramatically from housing the world’s poor to demonstrating the possibilities of low-energy and low-resource consumption housing for the broader Canadian public.84 The house would feature a rooftop garden, a Trombe passive-solar wall and a composting toilet, but no sulfur concrete blocks. Through ECOL II, the MCHG’s development-oriented knowledge and expertise would be even more accurately re-directed to the developed world’s post-Energy Crisis concerns with energy efficiency and ecological attuned living. However, ECOL II went unfunded and does not seem to have developed beyond some rudimentary drawings submitted to the UDP.85 Elements of another proposal, though, were constructed in the NGO section of the Habitat Forum. The Recover, Recycle, Reuse (RRR) demonstration house was a collaboration between Rybczynski and Martin Pawley of the Architectural Association, London.86 The duo proposed a small shelter “to be built using recycled waste materials,” which would include the MCHG’s favored sulfur concrete blocks as well as 12,000 Heineken World Bottles (WOBO—the infamous John Habraken-designed container intended to double as a building material in developing countries).87 The fact that the RRR house was not completed made it clear that the MCHG’s ambition to develop a model sulfur building block and a low-cost building model had not been accomplished. The ECOL II project effectively marked the end of the ECOL Operation. Alvaro Ortega and a few other MCHG alumni continued small-scale experiments elsewhere, concentrated on sulfur concrete technology, including a project led by Bernard Lefebvre in the Philippines’ high-profile Tondo Foreshore Urban Redevelopment area.88 However, no substantial further development or comprehensive application of the ECOL model seems to have been carried out.89 In the next decades, the MCHG’s projects moved from a focus on hands-on processes and prototype houses to more ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical development in areas such as urban sustainability.90

• 91 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction,” Social Research: An International Quarterly, special issue Failur (...)
• 92 Ayala Levin, “Beyond Global vs Local,” op. cit. (note 19).

26As Arjun Appadurai has put it, failure is a “cultural fact”—its changing historical understanding shaped and complicated by language and tradition, ideologies and technologies, even disciplinary differences.91 It is a variable concept. The early phase of MCHG’s work speaks to this complicated grounding of judgement. The ECOL Operation research program negotiated an uncomfortable, unstable mix of international development aspiration, industrial research and development, and eco-design rhetoric. It seems to have reflected the tactical agility required of Alvaro Ortega and his collaborators to initiate and then sustain the MCHG. The transformations of the program from 1970 to 1976 also reflect the uneven experience of broader international development work around this time—the promise and disappointments of initiatives such as “self- help” and “core housing” models—as well as the diverse experiences of the programs that emerged in development studies for architects and planners. The MCHG fit with the 1970s growth of training and research programs oriented toward educating independent, critical professionals rather than the uni-directional transmission of partial expert knowledge. That status was complicated, though, in that the enthusiasm for small-scale, labor-intensive methods and materials by architectural “experts” (such as the MCHG) was increasingly questioned by local users who understood modern, industrialized methods and materials as evidence of participation in an international community and enjoyment of the fruits of modernity as an equal partner.92 Ultimately, few, if any, of the MCHG’s ECOL Operation projects were carried out in the “non-industrialized countries” for which they were ostensibly imagined. On the other hand, the group’s research and building continued in Canada. The sponsorship of the ongoing research program by national government bodies and industry groups sometimes created, in retrospect, disquieting material and knowledge flows—the group maintained its experimentation with dangerous asbestos construction elements and with sulfur concrete, whose key element was drawn from resource extraction on the lands of the underserved communities with which the MCHG worked. Alongside this, the group’s publications engendered a lively circulation of information and guidance on self-sufficient, ecologically attuned, low-cost dwelling. Their readership was back-to-the-land counterculturalists and a nascent ecological design movement taking up the promises of alternative technology—and an associated interest in vernacular and traditional materials and methods—as part of retreat from large-scale, industrialized modern design. The “fruits” of modernity, often held up as ideals in the developing world context, were instead criticized by these groups as overwhelmingly alienating, exploitative, and environmentally harmful. In this turbulent setting, the MCHG’s efforts to deliver a self-help housing model for developing countries became, equally, a compelling blueprint for a set of designers and activists rethinking the consumerist lifestyles and material flows of the Global North. These shifting, multivalent outcomes of the ECOL Operation invite the suspension of judgement.