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The man with the plan

Thanks to the vision of architect Keith Tufts, Halifax’s new farmers’ market is a unique and innovative building.

One man, head and shoulders taller than most, stands still among the Saturday morning shoppers. It isn’t opening day, but the Seaport Farmers’ Market is still finding its legs: long-time market devotees search for their regulars’ stalls; newbies search for the bank machine.

Keith Tufts, the 49-year-old architect behind this new, grand community space takes it all in: the natural light pouring in, the plants starting to fill in the living wall, the line-ups, the buzz of a hundred conversations. “It’s a little like you’re walking in your own dream world,” he says.

He spent some 6,000 hours over five years to make the dream of a new, green market on the Halifax waterfront come true. From the outset, he saw a showcase for green technologies, and he and now former market manager Fred Kilcup brought that vision first to the market vendors. “Farmers understand the careful use of limited resources, so there wasn’t much convincing to be done,” recalls Tufts. “It was always just a question of money, of how much we could afford.”

Initially the answer was not much. The farmers had less than $100,000 in the bank when Tufts began work. “Luckily all those politicians understood and saw the benefits of having a major public building be this green,” he says. He helped secure funding from all three levels of government.

More than 500 private investors, including Tufts himself, also helped fund the building. “It says something big about this city, even if it’s not completely true yet,” he says.

Halifax has been his home through multiple careers. He’s a latecomer to architecture (he graduated in 2004); the Seaport Farmers’ Market was his first major building. Its ambitious nature is characteristic. “I’ve always reached very high and usually got knocked down,” says Tufts, who takes rejection as an invitation to redouble his efforts.

He spent three years getting CKDU onto the FM airwaves in the early 1980s when he was a finance student at Dalhousie University. He learned from scratch how to deal with the CRTC, set up corporate governance for a non-profit and build a radio studio. “I think they paid me a total of $5,000,” he says. “It was very exciting; not profitable at all but profitable for the community. Twenty-five years later, CKDU has had an impact.”

He went on to open Club Flamingo, a ground-breaking live music club that showcased local musicians years before the music media dubbed Halifax “the new Seattle.” Sarah McLachlan started her career there.

Tufts did go down the road to Toronto for several years, where he managed the band Moxy Früvous (which helped set Jian Ghomeshi on his road to peculiar Canadian fame), then returned to Halifax and reinvented himself as an Internet entrepreneur. He spent five years designing specialized websites for large companies but grew frustrated at not having a tactile product.

Not sure what should be next, he set off on a long road trip through the United States. He was in Arizona when he realized that architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s former home/office Taliesen West was nearby. Tufts was leaning on Wright’s desk, listening to a tour guide, when he experienced a conversion. “This bolt of lightning comes off that desk and hits me at the base of my spine and goes right up to where my brain stem is and I started crying these massive tears,” says Tufts. “I had to leave the room and collect myself. There was a voice screaming in my head: ‘This is what you’re supposed to do!”

Keith Tufts, Photo by Tammy Fancy/ fancyfreefoto.com

Tufts completed his road trip to the Pacific coast and then back home again to Halifax and enrolled in architecture school. There was never a question that green architecture would be his focus. “I’ve been a climate-change believer since the 1990s,” he says. “I choose to believe that 90 per cent of the world’s scientists are right.”

He’s a grand-nephew of Robie Tufts, author of Birds of Nova Scotia and the province’s first migratory birds officer. “He was a one-on-one inspiration to me,” says Tufts. “I literally sat at his knee in front of a roaring fire and dogs and he would tell me stories about birds and the wild.”

Some of these times happened at a cabin in Musquodoboit where Tufts still fishes, pheasant hunts and appreciates the undisturbed nature. The forest floor inspired the palette of the green roof on top of the Seaport Market, a mix of greens, yellows and reds.

On most projects, green technologies are the first cut. Though the green roof makes great business sense (it reduces heating and cooling costs and doubles the roof’s life expectancy) the higher initial cost can be hard to finance.

That’s one reason why Tufts doubts he’ll ever build a greener building. It’s also why it was so important to make the roof, with its windmills and solar panels, accessible to the public. “This is the best part of the boardwalk,” says Tufts, gesturing at the view of George’s Island, McNabs Island and Halifax Harbour.

He wants visitors to the Seaport Market to leave educated and inspired about green technologies. “Hopefully that’ll result in them making certain decisions in their own life because they can see quite simply there’s another way and it’s not nuts,” he says. “It’s actually beautiful.”

Architect and associate professor Brian Lilley supervised Tufts’s thesis at Dalhousie University’s school of architecture. That’s where Tufts developed some of the ideas that he eventually incorporated into the Seaport market. Lilley credits Tufts for working closely with an environmental engineer and figuring out the tricky details of adding windmills to a building, for example.

“I think it’s a tremendous step in the right direction that he’s been able to do all this under the kind of strong stricture of architecture that deal with liabilities and contracts,” says Lilley. “To take chances in Nova Scotia is an amazing thing and … he’s done it all in the public eye. Everything he’s done has been put right out there. If he would have failed, he would have failed dramatically. He deserves all the success he’s got.”

Tufts can watch the rooftop chives grow while he works. A rental space got incorporated into the third floor of the market during the design process, creating an important revenue stream. Lydon Lynch, the architecture firm where Tufts is one of three principals, now occupies the space.

His current project is the Lunenburg County Lifestyle Centre in Bridgewater, a large complex including yoga studios, a hockey rink and a 25-metre pool. “The real innovation there is we’re creating the ice with geothermal [energy] and in that process creating a lot of waste heat,” says Tufts. “And that waste heat is heating the rest of the building and we’re storing it in the pool to a certain extent.”

He’ll spend about five years on this project too, by the time it opens early in 2013. Then, maybe there will be another project in Halifax. “I’m trying to design for my community, that’s my big picture,” says Tufts. “Halifax still has enormous potential and I’m not talking more malls. I’m not talking more drive-thru shopping centres. I’m talking about what we can have on the streets of downtown Halifax.”

He attended a big solar convention in Raleigh, North Carolina last spring. The city’s convention centre hosted: “One of the greenest buildings I’ve been in,” says Tufts. “Above ground, with windows.”

On the adjoining streets, some of which allow pedestrians only, there was a free music festival. It’s the sort of event Tufts would like to see more of both on Spring Garden Road and the Common. “There are so many simple things that could happen that would just make this city so much more dynamic and enlarge the downtown economy in a way that people can hardly imagine,” says Tufts.

He has a track record. Who could imagine Halifax today without CKDU and a vibrant live music scene? Or the Seaport Farmers’ Market, for that matter. “I’m a proud Haligonian,” says Tufts. “Everything I do has been in an attempt to better my community and make it a better place to live and better place to play or work. I think this building did that in a big way.”

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