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He is considered a leading proponent
of regional, vernacular design, yet is innovative and edgy
enough to be part of last year’s "Emerging Voices"
series organized by the New York Architectural League. His
architecture is a clean and crisp retooling of the regional
forms and construction techniques seen in the boats, barns,
and sheds indigenous to Nova Scotia.
It may seem strange to seek a timelessness
and find one’s architecture is of the present moment,
or to look to the local and arrive at the universal: "Irony
is the first principle of life," MacKay-Lyons explains.
"You can start from there." Ironically, he started
off wanting to be a drummer. But the recognition that he could
draw changed things. Moreover, the 46-year-old architect was
steeped in the vernacular tradition: He grew up in Arcadia,
near a village where French ancestors on his mother’s
side settled almost 400 years ago.
A 1991 master plan for Dalhousie
University in Halifax that
MacKay-Lyons took on (with Charles Moore, Giancarlo de Carlo,
William Mitchell of MIT, and Atilio Gobbi) in 1998 resulted
in a 65,000-square-foot computer science building for the
campus, which is now part of Technical University.
The poured-in-place concrete structure
has a matte-finished zinc curtain wall that is reminiscent
of Kahn’s Mellon Center at Yale: The opaque, planar wall
seems to float above the butt-jointed, glazed, and recessed
base. Inside spaces open up dramatically because of the stair
hall and the adjoining five-story atrium. Served and servant
spaces are based on a "tartan grid" plan, with alternating
30-foot and ten-foot bays.
Perched on a 100-foot-long granite outcropping, The
Kutcher residence, a year-round
house for a psychiatrist, a social worker, and their children
embraces panoramic views of the Atlantic. MacKay-Lyons designed
the long, rectilinear house so that one enters from the rear
and at one end, first walking through a portal onto the terrace,
where suddenly the water view opens up.
The enclosing roof adopts an angular,
hooded shape with a standing-seam folded metal skin cladding
the structure’s purlins and trusses. The open, rectilinear
plan stretches 40 feet for the main living, dining, and kitchen
areas, bookended by two large fireplaces. The water’s
horizon line, seen through the expanse of sliding glass panels,
is echoed in the 22-foot-long kitchen counter, while the rear,
north wall is closed off by wood and a low concrete base wall.
Interior support is provided by five pairs of steel I-columns,
plus Douglas fir fins for wind bracing.
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