Explore Waterloo’s Past, Present and Future

by Eric Rumble
August 28th, 2009

Photos by Lisa Lotrijan (www.lisalphotography.com)

Explore a region bent on improving the world politically, sustainably, technologically, even cosmically. Welcome to Waterloo, the smartest place on the continent

A stone's throw from where the village of Waterloo was founded by Pennsylvanian Mennonites in the early 1800s, the permanent home of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) has stood for five years on what was once more colloquially hallowed ground: the site of an old hockey rink.

Designed by Montréal architects Gilles Saucier and André Perrotte, the permanent home of PI established an iconic global headquarters for probing the universe’s most inconceivable depths, and a beacon to some of the planet’s sharpest minds. Appropriately, some say the proto-futuristic, $24.5-million building looks like a huge microchip. Many folks are as flabbergasted by its arresting façades as they are by what happens behind them.

I can relate. Seated inside PI on a plush couch, soothed by a wood-burning fireplace and the abstract layers of brainstorming space, I tried to absorb one blackboard’s frazzled chalk formulae. To anyone watching, it was very Stanley Kubrick: a baffled ape peering at a monolith, cranium tilted.

Yet in the last five years, serious work has been done to bridge the knowledge gap. For the most part, 10-year-old PI’s day-to-day operations revolve around incubating the international study of particle physics, superstring theory, broad strokes of cosmology, quantum foundations, gravity and information
theory—notions too infinite for the naked eye. But the Nobel laureates and luminaries who have leapt at the chance to come to Waterloo have also been quick to unfurl what they’re learning.

“I haven’t seen another organization that’s this focused and this motivated to really share the joy of research and discovery with others,” says John Matlock, PI’s director of external relations and outreach. “It’s not by any means a token effort or an afterthought or some sort of caveat tied to funding. It’s just really in our fibre that we don’t want to remain some closed-off think tank dealing with esoteric ideas.”

Outreach takes on many forms. PI has academic relationships with dozens of universities. It contributes to notable international science conferences and will host its inaugural “Quantum to Cosmos” festival next month. PI has created sophisticated resources (a.k.a. Perimeter Explorations, serial physics-focused study modules) to empower public school teachers and students across the country.

PI’s most accessible effort has been an ongoing series of free public lectures by elusive and exotic geniuses, also being recorded for online content distribution and various broadcast outlets. Matlock describes the lectures, which draw crowds of 600-plus each month, as a “time capsule of the day’s greatest thinkers as they go about sharing their theories on the very essence of space, time, matter and information.”

Though it’s the cornerstone of a remarkable makeover that’s taking root in Uptown Waterloo, the PI headquarters is mostly a tourist attraction from the
outside, save for sporadic concerts or events in its sleek, sober 205-seat theatre. (Monthly lectures are actually held at Waterloo Collegiate Institute.) But across the street, a warehouse building that once housed the world’s largest booze museum has been reborn as an equally powerful prism for international affairs.

The former Seagram distillery grounds have become the domain of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (cigionline.org), the Waterloo region’s other marquee research entity funded by a RIM exec. CIGI aims to reform global governance and economic policy (taking on quagmires like poverty in China or war in Afghanistan), and is busy establishing a major law program (and campus construction plans) to complement its new international affairs institute, the Balsillie Centre of Excellence.

Inside the warehouse (a 150-year-old gem in its own right), gorgeous red pine racks reaching 11 stories high are still crammed with 295 weathered empty whisky barrels, forming a sort of cathedral filing cabinet of inebriation. It’s a tremendous sight. And because CIGI is concerned with “trying to create a community that’s vital and interested and involved in our work,” according to executive director John English, the space hosts frequent social events, including panel debates, book launches, policy conferences and blue-chip speakers like Thomas Homer-Dixon and John Ralston Saul.

Paradigm-shifting ideas have become a common currency around this cluster of three cities (Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo) about an hour west of Toronto. Waterloo-based Research In Motion CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis—who gifted $160 million to CIGI and its offshoots, and $150 million to PI, respectively—are the torchbearers of a savvy, inventive class of local investor whose pens are poised to get high-concept projects off the ground. And rarely have curious visitors been able to comb the frontiers of postmodern thought in as meaningful a way as they can in Waterloo.

Named for the battle that vanquished Napoleon, Waterloo became an ingenuity hub long before “CrackBerry” meant anything.

The budding town of Berlin (renamed Kitchener during WWI) was actually the country’s first municipality to get hydroelectric power, wiring it in from Niagara Falls in October 1910. Businessman Daniel Detweiler was instrumental in flicking that switch, biking the county’s sporadic gravel roads to tell locals not to fear the arcane jolt to their lifestyles, but to harness it, as he and his colleagues had.

One of these colleagues, Adam Beck, famously toured rural Ontario a couple years later with his Hydro Circus: a flatbed truck packed with electric machines—lamps aglow, whirring domestic appliances, a saw rig, a cow-milker—that quickly convinced the holdouts to embrace the future.

Think about that. A century ago, Waterloo’s leaders were already sewing a dynamic vision into their social fabric, rivalling larger, more-mature communities nearby. And beginning next spring, an ambitious public structure in southwest Kitchener will magnify how innovation has endured here ever since.

Detweiler’s bike and Beck’s fantasy flatbed will be two of hundreds of trailblazing artifacts inside the $26-million Region of Waterloo History Museum. Scheduled to unveil in phases between next May and late 2011, the building’s 47,000 square feet of lucid gallery space will not only be a boon to the region’s compelling past, they’ll add a necessary dose of modernity to the 1914 “living” historical village where it’s being built.

Designed by Moriyama and Teshima, the firm behind Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum and Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, the building plans convey a reverent, playful and beautiful space. One example is the road-facing exterior wall, a giant pixilated crescent covered by 560 rectangular glass panels. Inspired by historic textile patterns, the 16-colour neo-quilt will also spell out a poignant Wilfred Laurier quote in hexidecimal computer code (wherein words are formed with colour sequences).

Tom Reitz, curator of the museum’s 43,000-artifact library, explains that the planning process fleshed out a need for the project to echo both the area’s roots and its forward momentum. “History is happening right in front of us,” he says. “You can see it.”

Think of Waterloo as a tractor beam, inhaling intellectuals. The local economy boasts more than 500 tech companies, and 2.5 patents for every 10,000 employees. The University of Waterloo, which runs an unrivalled co-op program, is in the midst of a massive campus build-out and a faculty-transcending mandate to fuel a made-in-Canada evolution of green energy systems and the hardware to get us there.

Now, imagine a place where non-geniuses could go to comprehend the transformation that Waterloo is provoking. A place where you could stare at innovation’s strange fruit, get up close, take enough time to wrap your head around what makes it so special—a sort of idea zoo.

The REEP House for Sustainable Living could be the zoo’s first pavilion, delving deep into off-the-grid residential retrofitting. REEP— Residential Energy Efficiency Project—is the same organization that helped implement the Canadian government’s ecoENERGY program. Next month, it will open the first of two century-old brick houses that will be refurbished and repurposed as data-capturing, carbon footprint-cutting, money-saving, livable labs.

REEP House is basically an annotated renovation showroom, designed to help people evaluate best practices of making their own property more sustainable and, ultimately, more valuable. The elaborately explained retrofits being made and studied inside these two houses range from progressive and elegant (smart meters, solar hot water, a small wind turbine, sleek LED ambiance) to simple and crucial (cold cellars, rainwater reuse and creative insulation).

REEP’s pitch to homeowners is that the economics are irresistible: the energy savings over six years could pay for a complete $30,000 retrofit, give you a self-sufficient home and increase resale value. And you don’t necessarily have to buy the whole enchilada.

Project manager Ben Barclay figures public interest will be piqued by the big-ticket tech, like solar panels or the turbine. But data-wielding guides showing you around will mostly be trying to help you reprioritize.

“Hopefully, people are going to walk out and go get the wall insulation and basement insulation and attic insulation and seal in the envelope,” he says. “And then they’ll start worrying about how they’re generating their heat, and then hot water, and then they’ll get down to plug load and how to deal with that, and behavioural changes. And then they’ll think about renewable energy generation, which is solar heat and all that stuff.

“So it’s kind of funny that the number one attraction is the eighth step to take. But, so be it… We’re really trying to change their thinking.”

With a pedigree of intellectual innovation, a cultural imprint is solidifying. Not only are the region’s groundbreakers showing up the Big Smoke down Highway 401, they’re assembling the kind of ranks that create massive social transformation.

Take PI’s current director, a revered South African scientist named Neil Turok. Around the time he accepted the prestigious five-year gig, he’d just won a $100,000 TED Prize to help take his already pioneering math sciences institute—established in a refurbished art deco hotel near Cape Town—and evolve it into a Pan-African program that will “use science to overcome the national and cultural barriers” in hopes that “the next Einstein will be African.”

So as you wander Uptown Waterloo’s intriguing public spaces, ogling the natural and man-made beauty, be sure to stop, grab a seat at the pub, order a pint and consider something. The people around you are reinventing the way we live and think. The future is being crafted in southwestern Ontario.

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Comments

Rick Schmidt - 01/25/2010 - 11:27

great article, even for a Waterloo native like me. I never imagined ... as I grew up & attended school in Waterloo ... that I'd become so proud of my city.
Good job.