Ghost 13 speakers gather outside of the Barn for a team photo.
Thomas Fisher
“I’m just trying to see the world whole,” says Brian MacKay-Lyons, capturing in one sentence the crux of what made his Ghost Architectural Laboratory so significant as an educational experiment and as a critique of beginning design curriculum. “Ghost started out of my frustration with architectural education,” adds MacKay-Lyons. “I almost quit architecture school after I started. I went into architecture thinking that it would deal with the landscape, with making things, with community, which it didn’t. The street outside was more interesting than what was going on in the studio.”
Despite such misgivings, MacKay-Lyons finished his bachelor of architecture at the Technical University of Nova Scotia and went on to receive a master of architecture from UCLA, after which he returned to Halifax to teach. There he discovered that “faculty meetings are never about content, never talking about why we are doing this.” Those experiences led him to start the two-week summer design/build program that he dubbed the “Ghost Lab.” The program was located on farmland in Lower Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, amid ruins of houses near the first French settlements in North America, established by Samuel de Champlain in 1604.1 “I started Ghost,” he says, “because first-year students needed to know that they are right, that architecture is about landscape, making things, and community” instead of what he sees as all too common in our schools: the separation of the mind from the hand and of the academy from the world around it.
As architectural education has become “less about making things,” says MacKay-Lyons, we need to return to “the idea of making architecture out of local materials and local labor and making it affordable.” At the same time, he does not believe students can “learn to design with hammer in hand. They need a degree of distance from the job site, and to learn that the role of the architect is not to be the builder, but to be the designer.” As the culmination of a dozen Ghost Labs, Ghost 13 indirectly addressed this pedagogical conundrum.
At the symposium, for example, Rick Joy asked, “What should we teach?”2 MacKay-Lyons responded with his “one-room schoolhouse approach to architectural education, in which there would be just three courses: one about place, dealing with the environment, landscape, and urbanism; one about craft, addressing technology, making, and material culture; and one about community, including clients, culture, and social agency.” That three-part pedagogy formed the structure of Ghost 13. Each day of the symposium focused on one of those topics—place, craft, and community—under the overarching theme of “Ideas in Things.”3
That lesson came through clearly in the stellar lineup of designers that MacKay-Lyons assembled for the conference. After the opening keynote address by Kenneth Frampton on the role of place-based architecture as a form of resistance to globalism, architects Rick Joy, Ted Flato, Wendell Burnette, Deborah Berke, and Marlon Blackwell, along with historian Robert McCarter, discussed the influence of place on their architecture. Some of them practice far from the main centers of architectural production, in cities like Tucson, San Antonio, and Fayetteville, although Burnette’s office in Phoenix and Berke’s office in New York City counter the claim that MacKay-Lyons made, with his usual self-deprecating sense of humor, that “we’re all boonies architects.”4 All of them, though, demonstrated, through their work, how great buildings help define and create the context in which they stand, to reveal the nature of a place that was often unappreciated before the architecture made it visible.
Paradoxically, the popularity of these architects has brought them commissions far from their offices, which has also led them to alter the forms and materials they commonly use. Rick Joy’s shingled and fieldstone house in New England, for example, was quite different from the rammed-earth and Cor-ten steel he employs in Arizona. These diverse commissions, however, showed how place-specific architecture may be the only way to engage globalization in a sustainable and culturally appropriate way.
The second keynote speaker, Juhani Pallasmaa, reinforced that idea, writing:
Such sentiments show how the battle lines of architectural education have been redrawn. Instead of the late twentieth-century division between a formalist avant-garde and a nostalgic rear guard, we now have a divide between those who continue to design for what Pallasmaa calls “the obsessive ideal of perpetual growth…[and] the suicidal course of industrial civilizations” and those who believe that our “daily practices and education ha[ve] to be fundamentally re-evaluated…giv[ing] up the hubris of regarding ourselves as the centerpiece of the universe, and as the homo sapiens who know.”6
That division creates a dilemma for architects, evident in the talks during the conference’s second day. Architects Patricia Patkau, Peter Stutchbury, Brigitte Shim, Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos, and Tom Kundig each presented exquisite and often very expensive houses as examples of the quality and quantity of craft still possible in today’s construction. The wealth required to fund such work, though, has largely arisen from the global economy’s concentration of money and power in the hands of a relatively few, placing our profession in the awkward position of depending on the profits of perpetual growth even as we recognize the unsustainability of this model. And yet, the work these architects showed offered a way past that dilemma. Their attention to the craft of construction applies as much to modest houses as it does to megamansions, making the issue not about economics, but instead about ethics and the existential act of humans “improving the world rather than using it up,” as MacKay-Lyons called it.
Historian Peter Buchanan addressed the question of whether the beautifully crafted buildings of these architects represented a new “arts and crafts” and whether that aligned or conflicted with the growing use of digital design and fabrication. Most participants refused to polarize these issues. As MacKay-Lyons said, “It’s always ‘both-and’: both digital and analog, mind and hand, past and future.”
In the third keynote, Glenn Murcutt confronted the issue of professional responsibility by observing that it primarily rests with doing great architecture. MacKay-Lyons underscored that later when he said: “Architecture needs both artists and activists, but every architect has to decide which is primary and which is secondary.” The architect-educators who spoke on the final day of the conference had clearly decided that question. Andrew Freear, Dan Rockhill, Steve Badanes, Richard Kroeker, and Brian MacKay-Lyons all provided moving and, at times, highly entertaining accounts of their efforts, mostly with students, to design and build beautiful projects often for people of modest means in isolated locations. This, too, had a “both-and” quality as most of them showed artful structures made with activist intentions that built a sense of community.
A sense of community pervaded Ghost 13. The speakers, most of them alumni of previous Ghost Labs, as well as the audience of nearly two hundred architects, educators, critics, and students, displayed a degree of camaraderie that came not only from being together for three days in an isolated location, but also from sharing a common purpose and mission. As Pallasmaa described it, “the best examples of architecture arise from a deep understanding of the place and its climatic and natural characteristics…project[ing] a special beauty, the beauty of human reason and ethics.”7
Creating that beauty in a world torn between the self-indulgent excesses of a few and the undeserved deprivations of so many may seem daunting, but it has not deterred these architects, MacKay-Lyons included. “We have to will paradise into existence,” MacKay-Lyons says, “however utopian that may sound.” And the Ghost Lab site stands as evidence: an entire landscape conceived and constructed by MacKay-Lyons and his colleagues and students over the last seventeen years, containing everything from a boathouse and barn to cabins and cabanas to houses and horse pastures. “There is aesthetic pleasure in seeing things whole,” says MacKay-Lyons, “with designing and making, practice and teaching, family and community as one.” The Ghost Lab, he adds, “reminds people that it is possible and that they, too, can live in this way.”
MacKay-Lyons sees the small-scale work of the Ghost Lab as relevant to the large-scale problems we face. “Small projects can change the world,” he says. “Look at the impact of Glenn Murcutt,” who has transformed our thinking about climate-responsive design with a number of modest-size houses. Such aspirations bring to mind CIAM and Team 10—twentieth-century gatherings by a few of the world’s leading architects and critics to formulate new directions for architecture and urban design. Unlike those earlier efforts, Ghost 13 did not produce a manifesto or charter (although this book about the conference may serve that role well), but the conference did identify a coherent architectural and educational response to the homogeneity, unsustainability, and inequality of the global economy.
That made the location of the conference particularly prescient. When Champlain landed on that Nova Scotia coast a little over four hundred years ago, he—along with the British, who landed in Jamestown a few years later—set in motion the global economy of extracting resources, exploiting native people, and extinguishing species. We tend to see the French and English struggle for power in North America as essentially political and military in nature, but as we look out over the bay where Champlain’s ships first set anchor and think about what might have happened differently had his view of the world prevailed, it becomes clear that what mattered in the tension between those two world powers revolved around their differing cultural and environmental agendas.
The French largely had exploration and trade in mind when they established present-day Quebec in 1608, seeking to coexist with the native people. They controlled the number of immigrants allowed to enter New France so as not to overwhelm their few permanent settlements, which they built as compactly and unobtrusively as possible. The same characterized the fur-trading posts the French built on native lands. Constructed of local timber, these posts were inhabited for relatively short periods of time, at which point the traders would burn them to the ground, salvage the nails, and move on, leaving almost no trace behind.
The English took a very different approach. Setting up their first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, the English pursued colonization rather than coexistence, disrupting native populations through military confrontation, land seizure, and the introduction of disease. The English also encouraged settlers to come to the new world, rapidly increasing their numbers and forcing native people and animals to retreat.
The English, of course, not only triumphed over the native populations, but also over the French, who ceded much of their territory after losing the Seven Years’ (or French and Indian) War two hundred fifty years ago. This directly affected Nova Scotia, where, during the war, the British deported the French-speaking Acadian population, some of whom returned afterward and many of whom resettled in France or Cajun Louisiana. With the dominance of the commercial, land-owning settlement pattern of the English came the enormous prosperity that many North Americans have since enjoyed, yet also the astounding ecological devastation that we now face.
While the concept did not yet exist then, the English set about creating what we might now call a “Ponzi scheme” with the continent, exhausting land and resources and taking advantage of other species and people. These practices have brought us to a precipice, in which North Americans now require the equivalent of nearly five Earths to meet our resource requirements and to absorb our waste and pollution.8 And, like all Ponzi schemes, this one will collapse. We can continue to pretend this won’t happen, as most of the investors in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme did until they lost everything, or we can begin to envision life after the global economy, as the Ghost 13 participants have started to do.
Their work shows what living within our ecological footprint might be like. People would live much more modestly, in much closer communities, with much more stewarding of the land and its resources than we do today. Buildings would respond to their climate and culture, constructed by local craftspeople and made of local, renewable, and recyclable materials. And settlements would be more compact, able to sustain themselves largely on what local economies and ecologies can provide.
That may sound unrealistic, but circumstances seem likely to drive us in this direction, whether or not we choose to go. After the fall of the Roman Empire—a fall that Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon attributes at least in part to Rome’s exhausting the environmental resources on which it depended—Europeans regrouped into small communities that lived locally and sustainably out of necessity.9 And they rediscovered what the Roman Stoics had long urged upon their over-consuming compatriots: that human beings actually need very little to stay alive, to live well, and to be happy. A good life does not come from having more—more property, more money, more stuff—but from having meaning, which comes from community, collaboration, and coexistence.
What befell the Roman Empire may well happen again, but at a global scale this time and with consequences possibly more dire, given the sheer size of the human population. We can only guess as to what might push us over the edge, whether it would be disruptions of food and water supplies because of climate change or interruptions of fuel and energy resources because of political conflict or eruptions of impoverished or oppressed people because of economic inequalities. However this happens, though, Ghost 13 showed us the role that architects play in this transition. The design community has the ability to envision alternative futures, to help people overcome their fear of change and to see how a healthier, happier, and, as MacKay-Lyons puts it, a “more wholesome existence” can come of it. Located at the place where the global economy began in North America some four hundred years ago, Ghost 13 represented a new kind of beginning for design, one that goes far beyond buildings to ask the question of how we should live if humanity hopes to be here four hundred years from now.
All quotes not otherwise cited come from Brian MacKay-Lyons, in discussion with the author, summer 2011.
1 Brian MacKay-Lyons, Ghost: Building an Architectural Vision (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 18.
2 Rick Joy, conversation with the audience of Ghost 13, Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 2011.
3 Ghost 13, “Ideas in Things,” MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, Architects, http://mlsarchitects.ca/mobile/ghost.htm.
4 Brian MacKay-Lyons, conversation with the audience of Ghost 13, June 2011.
5 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Architecture and the Human Nature: A Call for a Sustainable Metaphor” (lecture, Ghost 13, June 2011).
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Stewart Wallis, “The Four Horsemen of Economics,” The New Economics Foundation Blog, October 31, 2011. http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/the-four-horsemen-of-economics.
9 Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 246–50.
