Passage Island Retreat

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By questioning the workers, I'd learned that Felix Candela was the building's architect, engineer and contractor. As I found out when I met him in his Mexico City office two years later, he had already created over 300 shell structures. Mr. Candela was most generous in supplying design basics for hyperbolic paraboloids, though he told me I'd never build one in Canada because their construction was too labor intensive. To prove his point, the architect showed me a photograph of a church under construction in Narvarte, D.F., near Mexico City. You could hardly see the roof for the army of workers busily placing concrete by hand. But by that point, the project was far too intriguing for me to be dissuaded. Building a concrete roof with both convex and concave curves using straight lumber for the formwork was something I just had to do.

After much thought and sketching, I chose the saddle, so named for its shape, from Candela's numerous shell designs. The floor plan would be a modest 1,000-square-foot bachelor pad, but with all the big city comforts. (Little did I know that I would be joined by a new wife, two new sons and two dogs over the next few years. Some bachelor pad.)

Passage Island, being devoid of utilities, made building seem at times like an exercise in reinventing the house. No sewers, so there would be a septic tank and dispersal field. No power lines, so a small generator was needed. No municipal water, so a controlled catchment system had to be devised. No gas mains, so propane would have to provide heat, cooking and refrigeration. On and on the list went.

Because propane would serve all the high-energy-use appliances, low-voltage direct current was a practical choice for lights and small appliances. Finding 12-volt equipment was no problem, since the advent of the recreation vehicle had created a whole new world of quality low-voltage TVs, hi-fis, radios, pumps and fluorescent light fixtures items well suited to the rigorous duty on Passage Island. DC energy also has the advantage of being storable in a battery bank, so the generator need not run constantly. The decision to use 12-volt power was easy, though I've gone through some refinements to reach the present system of a 210-amphour diesel starter battery and an AC/DC Honda generator.

Controlled catchment is a fancy way of saying that rainwater is collected from the roof, stored in a cistern and fed to the plumbing by an automatic pump. One inch of rain on one square foot of roof area delivers a little more than a half gallon of water to the cistern. With the addition of a little chlorine for sterilization, the trapped rainwater covers our basic domestic needs, though we prefer to bring over tasty West

Vancouver water in bottles for drinking.

Propane was, at first, hauled over by small boat in tanks weighing 175 pounds when full. In stormy weather, getting those bottles onto and off of a rocking boat was a real trial. Fortunately, there's now a propane barge that delivers gas to individual 500gallon tanks on the island.

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