Upper Kingsburg,
Nova Scotia
Sited at the LaHave River estuary on Nova Scotia’s Atlantic coast, where Samuel de Champlain made his first landfall in the new world in 1604, the Ghost Architectural Laboratory was started in 1994 by Brian MacKay-Lyons. In its thirteen iterations, it served as an international education center in the building arts, as well as a constructive critique of contemporary architectural education. The resulting campus, built in and around the foundations of previous structures, is an expression of utopian architectural ambitions, constructed with the most modest means. The structures are constructed using traditional local building techniques and renewable materials from nearby sawmills, and like the vernacular farmhouses, barns, and boathouses of Nova Scotia, are sustainable in every possible meaning of the word. As a place of learning through making with your own hands, and through collaborating with others, the Ghost Lab enacts Giambattista Vico’s aphorism, verum ipsum factum; “we only know what we have made.” As MacKay-Lyons notes, “By ‘listening’ to the site’s rich history and local material culture traditions, yet ‘willing’ buildings that are clearly modern, the Ghost Lab is a built critical regionalist argument.”
Old Ghosts
Ghost Lantern, by Ghost Lab 1,
Upper Kingsburg, 1999
