Brian MacKay-Lyons
Halifax, Nova Scotia
MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple’s architecture is the result of both “listening to the place” and “willing paradise” into existence. To a degree increasingly rare in today’s world, their work is grounded in its local place, with its uniquely volatile climate, landscape, and material culture. They feel themselves to be part of both local tradition and universal modernism, in that they cite Frank Lloyd Wright’s building six hundred houses using only four “types,” as well as noting, “the vernacular is always up-to-date.” Each of their projects involves the ordinary and the extraordinary, the local and the universal, the circumstantial and the archetypal. Learning from their place, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple believes that “the landscape is the project,” and that agriculture and architecture are parallel ways of cultivating the land. Their houses are “landscape-viewing devices,” providing both prospect and refuge, and they endeavor to make their buildings become an integral part of their place. Having empathy for the world, and a desire to improve it, as well as anger at the state it is in, they believe that “you should leave the world a better place than you found it.”
