Kootenay Cabin

Architect Brian MacKay-Lyons has an unusual perspective on the “rootedness” implied by his long activity in his native Nova Scotia, Canada, and his experiences of the broader world. He spoke to Philip Jodidio about the importance of Nova Scotia in his work.

Brian MacKay-Lyons has built extensively in Nova Scotia, where he was born in 1954. Between 1985 and 2025, he designed and built 50 structures on Kingsburg Peninsula, which is about 120 km
south-west of Halifax. Many of these are located on his Shobac Farm. This concentration sets him apart in a world where borders and cultures no longer seem permanent. “Rootedness is important”, he says, “not because of some kind of provincial or ethnocentric perspective but because of the deep connection of our work to landscape. There is a meaningful connection to place, and we get described by critics as ‘architects of place’. This is of interest because there is so much of a loss of sense of place in our current globalized culture. Understanding climate, landscape, material culture, are the things that can create an architectural place”. He identifies his colleagues Francis Kéré and Marlon Blackwell as being of a like mind on this subject. MacKay-Lyons received a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the Technical University of Nova Scotia in 1976, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the same school in 1978. His Master of Architecture (Urban Design) was earned at UCLA in 1982, the same year he worked in the office of one of his teachers, Charles Moore (Moore Ruble Yudell), in Santa Monica.

MacKay-Lyons created his own studio in Halifax in 1985 and formed MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, his current firm, in the same city in 2005. The architect taught at his alma mater Dalhousie University in Halifax for 37 years, serving as a full professor there from 1997 until 2020. His activity as a professor marked not...

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