Architecture: Simply Beautiful
Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.
Brian MacKay-Lyons, a founder of the Halifax architectural firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, loves Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. He also reveres the unsung heroes of Maritime architecture: the men and women who built the schooners, sheds and gabled farmhouses of Nova Scotia. "I look at the vernacular buildings around me and also at the global masterworks," he says. "I'm not terribly interested in the things in between."
Last year, Thames and Hudson released a monograph charting the architect's decades-long career, which is defined by competing impulses: mysticism versus rationality. His most iconic projects are uncommonly surreal. The Bridge House in southwestern Nova Scotia is a slatted lantern that spans a valley between granite outcroppings. The Two Hulls residence comprises a pair of oblong cantilevers extruding from the coastline, like binoculars trained on the horizon.
Other works are more restrained. "The best environments are created without architects," Mr. MacKay-Lyons says. "I like to think about what a pragmatic person – a fisherman, for instance – would build when he can't afford to get anything wrong." A recent house, Mirror Point Cottage, near Annapolis Royal, in southwestern Nova Scotia, exemplifies his late-career style, which tends toward minimalism. "As I get more confident, I find myself making simpler and simpler buildings," he says.
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