Architecture: At Ease in the Landscape
Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.
When tourists visit a city or streetscape they like, they often say it has “character.” North Americans typically use this word in reference to Europe. As a descriptor, it’s borderline meaningless. (What is character? Arches and colonnades?) But we know it when we see it.
I suspect that when we talk about “character,” we’re often referring to a sense of aesthetic consistency. When a region has character, the buildings seem like they belong there. They are at ease in the landscape – and in each other’s company.
Character also implies folksiness. It’s a description more often applied to fishing villages than master-planned suburbs. “Vernacular building traditions around the world have this quality, like snowflakes,” says architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, a partner at the Halifax firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple. “They work through theme and variation. In Tuscany, for instance, everything goes together well.
Mr. MacKay-Lyons has devoted his career to studying vernacular building traditions, seeking what lessons these folk cultures can offer and incorporating them into his work. One such insight is that residential design isn’t only about individual structures; it’s about the relationship between them. The job of situating homes relative to one another (i.e. the work of “planners”) is really architecture by another name. It’s all about materials, volumes, and the creation of space.
In 2014, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple was invited to submit a project proposal for Bigwin Island, located on the Lake of Bays in the Muskoka District of Ontario. The island has a golf course designed by landscape architect and avid golfer Stanley Thompson, who was famous for incorporating rugged nature into his fairways and greens. Investment banker Jack Wadsworth bought a stake in the property twenty-five years ago and acquired the entire island over the decade and a half that followed. In the past, other stakeholders had considered putting a 250-room hotel on Bigwin to accommodate club members who’d otherwise have to travel to the course by ferry. Mr. Wadsworth opted for a less intrusive development: forty modest cabins to be integrated into the surroundings.
Mr. MacKay-Lyons was one of six finalists to present a full-fledged proposal to Mr. Wadsworth and his advisors. “Brian brought a box with building blocks inside, kind of like Lincoln Logs,” says Mr. Wadsworth. “We sat across the table putting them together into any configurations we wanted. It was kids’ play, but it was also a brilliant architect’s statement about what he planned to do.”
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.