-By Robert McCarter

For the last 25 years, in a critical regional practice par excellence, Nova Scotian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons has been what he calls the "village architect" for Kingsburg, a small cluster of farms whose roots can be traced back to one of the earliest European settlements in North America, first founded on the southeastern coast of Nova Scotia more than 400 years ago by French-Acadians. During this same period, he also realized a series of buildings in the city of Halifax, where he searched for the urban equivalent of the "primitive hut" that lies at the origin of architecture—a fundamental kind of urbanism appropriate for modern times. Also during this period, he began a second career as a professor of architecture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and 15 years ago he started the "Ghost Laboratory" projects—annual two-week design-build workshops held on the Nova Scotian coast. More recently, he and his firm since 2004, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, have been recognized as being among Canada's leading architects and have received steadily increasing attention in both national and international publications, as well as an expanding number of commissions outside Nova Scotia.



MacKay-Lyons maintains that his work "comes out of the ground, out of a particular place," a literal "grass roots" that comes from having what he calls a short focal length. This is balanced by his insistence on "going to the mountaintop," analyzing the works of the masters of Modern architecture—in particular Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Luis Barragan, and Louis Kahn—what he calls having a long focal length. These short and long focal lengths allow MacKay-Lyons to literally overlook the middle-ground of what is in fashion at the moment, enabling him instead to focus on coming to terms with the fundamental and essential principles of his discipline. Rather than being any kind of impediment to practice, MacKay-Lyons feels that his peripheral and remote location in Nova Scotia has allowed him to maintain this focus, or concentration, on what really matters in architecture.

Yet, rather than exhibiting any kind of provincialism, MacKay-Lyons' practice exemplifies the concept of a liberative regionalism, in which aspects of universal civilization are adapted to the local culture, reinventing and transforming both the universal and the local to make a unique and appropriate construction for its particular place and time. MacKay-Lyons' deep understanding of his place—its ancient traditions of farming, fishing, and boat-building; the characteristics of its climate and landform; the methods of building; and the nature of the materials at hand—is critical. His work has a directness that arises from tending to the nature of these materials, rather than imposing his own formal desires upon them. This is related to the Bauhaus and Black Mountain weaver Anni Albers' statement: "Being creative is perhaps not the desire to do something, but listening to that which wants to be done, the dictation of the materials."

MacKay-Lyons, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, operates in the tradition of practice, engaging the ethical and aesthetic principles—economical, functional, ecological, constructive, structural, material, psychological, sensorial, social, and cultural—that together affect our experience of inhabitation, which remains the ultimate measure of a work of architecture. The common characteristics that MacKay-Lyons' buildings share with the local vernacular structures of Nova Scotia are a sense of restraint and economy—in the sense of getting the greatest benefit from the least expenditure of material, energy, and space, and an understated yet precise revelation of the nature of local building materials and how they are transformed by weather and time. Starting from his first, "zero point" works, MacKay-Lyons has accepted and engaged the severe limitations imposed by the climate, topography, and building culture of his place, and the high quality of his work may be directly related to these limits. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who said: "Limitations are the architect's best friends."

MacKay-Lyons' example indicates that architects best serve their local culture by employing practices that leave the place in which they work more cultivated—capable of sustaining richer experiences of inhabitation—than when they first came to it. This process of building the site—a cultivation of the land, whether rural or urban—involves looking both forward and backward in time, and using the traces of the history of agricultural or architectural inhabitation of the site to counteract the current ravages of suburban sprawl and overdevelopment, depressingly the same around the world. MacKay-Lyons' recent projects—many of which are at ever-greater distances from his home on the southeast coast of Nova Scotia—offer him the chance to apply the tool kit of "lessons learned at home" to projects being built in places like Bangladesh. He sees this work as a natural extension of his practice from the small village of his home to the larger "village of the world," where his work continues to come out of its place, out of the ground on which it is built, and out of the building cultures of these new places.

The work of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects unites the universal and local, fuses the vernacular and modern, re-integrates architecture and agriculture as two related ways of cultivating the land, and re-establishes the importance of place—with its climate, landform, geology, sunlight, and its history of inhabitation, cultivation, and construction—in the making of contemporary architecture. Maintaining his disciplinary focus and his ethical balance, MacKay-Lyons makes what has always been, and always will be, appropriate—an architecture of its place and time.

Robert McCarter is a practicing architect, professor, and author. He is the Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to this appointment, he taught at the University of Florida and at Columbia University, among others. He is the author of Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Lives (2006), On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles (2005), Louis I. Kahn (2005), William Morgan, Architect (2002), Frank Lloyd Wright (1997), among others. Currently he is under contract for three books, Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, and Architecture as Experience: A Primer. In summer 2007, he was the invited critic for Ghost Laboratory 9.