A great building helps reveal the nature of its surroundings, which was often unappreciated before the architecture made it visible. Brian MacKay-Lyons’ “Ghost” is both a utopian endeavor (that Glenn Murcutt calls a kind of paradise) and an international design-build internship that focuses on landscape, making, and community. The following four architectural projects, described here by Robert McCarter (as it appears in Brian MacKay-Lyon’s book Local Architecture), are good examples of buildings that help define and create the context in which they stand.
Ghost Architectural Laboratory
Nova Scotia, Canada
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.”
Jersey Devil, Design/Build
United States
Principal of Jersey Devil, Steve Badanes established one of the very first contemporary design-build practices, which he has continued now for forty peripatetic years. He is also involved in organizing several academic design-build programs around the United States, most recently for the University of Washington in Seattle and in Mexico. In both his practice and teaching, he has endeavored to continue the sense of urgency generated by the energy crisis of the early 1970s, and the impact this had on principles of architectural practice. He has also learned from and engaged local vernacular building practices where they offered alternatives to energy-expending technology, such as his use of the traditional “Cracker House” morphology to minimize or eliminate the need for air-conditioning in his Florida works. Badanes’s works indicate how, as he says, “small projects of high quality, far from the centers of media and culture, can have a positive impact on the larger society.” His work has exemplified the belief that “the profession needs to be more proactive” — in general, and, in particular, in addressing contemporary architecture’s failure to be sustainable in every meaning of the word.
Kéré Architecture
Berlin and Burkina Faso
Francis Kéré’s architecture is architecture of the earth in its purest form; like the mud buildings of the Dogon region (which neighbors his native Burkina Faso), his work approaches the “absolute zero”of architecture. Trained in Germany, he combines contemporary western scientific knowledge with traditional African building techniques to overcome local challenges, resulting in innovative cooling systems achieved with locally available materials; clay brick walls with overhanging corrugated metal roofs supported by reinforcing bar trusses allow airflow between roof and ceiling. By “respond[ing] to the extreme climate conditions and to use locally abundant materials, emphasis is set on the village’s potential: material and labor are found within the community, ensuring the sustainability of the project.” Of critical importance is the fact that Kéré’s “philosophy goes beyond sustainable design and encompasses an essential development aspect: integrating the villagers in the process, the project spurs empowerment. The people gain vital skills as they are confronted with the responsibility of building a brighter future for the next generations.” Kéré’s architecture grows directly out of the minimal materials and maximal spirit of his own community.
Glenn Murcutt
New South Wales, Australia
Glenn Murcutt is the world’s leading practitioner of environmentally responsive architecture. In his work, climate and landscape are the primary generators of space and form. He believes that built works are, invariably, reflections of society’s values, and that the house is central to architecture; “a house is an instrument played by nature.” He draws inspiration from his intimate and extended interactions with nature, in both its general ordering principles and site-specific particularities. His work exemplifies those increasingly rare moments when craft springs from local culture, and as a result architecture is fully integrated into both its natural and social place. Murcutt believes that architecture involves an ethical responsibility to the people and place for which it is built. He seeks an architecture based on fundamental ordering principles learned through practice and shared with the architects of previous generations, and appropriately interpreted for its place. He states, “If we are to make an architecture that responds to our land, place, its climate, the flora, fauna, culture, technology, and time, then as architects we must work toward an architecture of response rather than an architecture of imposition.”
Local Architecture: Building Place, Craft, and Community by Brian MacKay-Lyons and edited by Robert McCarter, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is available from:
Brian MacKay-Lyons is principal of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects and a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
