Brian MacKay-Lyons’ newly expanded Shobac Studio is not so much a house as it is a kind of roman à clef—a life story steeped in the history of its site, the traditions of the region, and his own evolving views on architecture and construction. It’s also a Ghost story—and the ghosts are the scores of architects, students, critics, and historians who gathered on his property each year for a hands-on master class in regional design-build construction.
Beginning in 1994 and continuing for a dozen years, Ghost Lab, as the program was called, extracted participants from urban classrooms and practices all over the world—a new group each summer—and immersed them in this remote and ruggedly beautiful landscape and its haunting sense of history.
The seaside property, stitched together over the years, contained remnants and ruins of former homesteads when the Ghost program launched and is now a working farm and village community, dotted with the program’s idiosyncratic constructions and MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple’s professional projects.
Shobac Campus and Farm is now a quilt of structures, each with its own meaning and memories, showing the work of many hands but guided by Brian’s mandate to distill, reduce, and simplify. The result is a collection of elemental and timelessly modern buildings that serve a variety of flexible functions. Chief among them is to experience and appreciate this spectacular locale.
The collection of buildings includes the Shobac Studio, a half dozen cabins, a restored barn and schoolhouse, a Cor-Ten “gate house,” and the “Sky-Room”—a outdoor star-gazing spot adapted from a historic foundation. (“The foundation is older than any official European history,” Brian notes.) But it’s the Shobac Studio—dubbed “the whale”— that anchors the campus and establishes its sense of place.
Ship in a Bottle
Once a remote and forested area where the LaHave River estuary joins the North Atlantic Ocean, Upper Kingsburg traces its roots variously to native indigenous peoples, an outpost for early explorers, seasonal fishing settlements, and farmlands. Utilitarian structures are a component of its vernacular building traditions.
When the eighth Ghost gathering took place in 2006, the concept was to design and build a sizable studio and dining hall for the program. At 100-feet long, it was going to be the biggest and most commanding addition to the property, but it needed to derive its inspiration from the challenging climate and the modest origins of the place. An industrial agrarian building was a natural fit.
Brian also tapped a solution he had used for the 1999 Howard House, located on a similar waterfront, cliffside site. The “zoomorphic wedge” shape, as the firm calls it, aims its rising “head” toward the water views and its tapering “tail” toward the land. Given the constraints—budget, time, labor skills—Shobac is even more pared down in its expression than the private Howard House, and thus cleaves even closer to the firm’s goal of “an architecture in dialogue with the ordinariness of a particular place.”
Keeping the building simple was also a practical consideration, as it was to be built on a tight schedule and by hand with largely unskilled labor. “It was built in a week,” Brian recalls. “And those trusses were built in the air and done in a single day. By suppertime, the structure was up. No single piece could be more than 200 pounds. It was like building a boat in a bottle, with a ship’s hull geometry.”
“It’s passive solar, so it faces south and has a thermal mass concrete floor,” he adds. “There are high windows on the north side and big ones on the south for the Venturi effect. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa said about our work that you can feel the forces of nature operating on you here. You can feel the climate—kind of like a weather station.”
One room deep with a 40-foot dining table at its center—the space served a variety of functions in its ensuing 17 years. Ghost participants gathered at the table for creative brainstorming and meals, Brian’s firm used it as a satellite office, and it functioned as a community space for events—the beating heart of the Shobac Campus.
The Homecoming
Over the years, Brian’s career and commissions have lured him all over the world. But this region has always called him back. His adult children also left for school and other experiences, but they found themselves called back here as well. Whether living and working nearby or on the mainland, Kingsburg is the family center—the homestead.
So it made sense to adapt the Shobac Studio into a home for Brian and his wife, a neuroscientist, and a locus—with that 40-foot-long table—for bringing family and friends together. Indeed, the project was a family affair, with son Matthew the project architect and daughter Renée the structural engineer.
In keeping with the firm’s belief in building just “enough house” and no more, the changes were executed with restraint. Small tweaks to the original structure include a new open deck, a reworked main entrance, and new storage and laundry facilities. A small sleeping alcove off the main living area and kitchen was retained; and an existing loft bedroom and bath is now the compact primary suite. “The alcove is the only place you don’t see the ocean,” says Brian.
Conjoining the lightly renovated double-height building is a new addition that continues the taper of the wedge shape. Viewed from overhead, you’d mistake it as a single entity, now extending 200 feet in length instead of 100 and terminating in a covered storage for firewood. From the broad sides, though, it’s obvious where the two pieces are stitched together.
The stick-built addition contains a pool, spa, and gym—ideal for keeping fit during hot summers and cold winters. “My wife wanted the pool,” Brian says. “She has always wanted a pool. She works as a stroke researcher and knows what happens when you don’t move your body.”
In the spirit of Shobac’s utopian village ideals, the new facility is available to the community, he says. And, at twice its original length, the building creates even more of a protected courtyard space in relation to the structures around it than it did before. “There’s something archetypical about that—something timeless,” he explains. “We often work with the space between buildings, like white space on a canvas.”
In transforming the Shobac Studio into his own home, the architect resisted padding it with luxurious finishes and flourishes. It merely extrudes the austerity of the original to encompass a few utilitarian amenities. Architect/critic Kenneth Frampton once called Brian’s work “banal,” he says, and he takes it as a compliment, “When you achieve the banal, it’s as if the building was always meant to be there.”
Original Building
Shobac Studio/Spa Extension
Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia
Architect: Brian MacKay-Lyons, FRAIC, FAIA, design lead; Matthew MacKay-Lyons, job captain, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Builder: Axios Construction, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
Structural Engineering: Renée MacKay-Lyons, Blackwell, Halifax
Mechanical and Electrical: M&R Engineering, Ltd., Halifax
Project Size: Studio and spa, 3,600 square feet; spa extension only, 1,500 square feet
Construction cost: Withheld
Photography: Matthew MacKay-Lyons
Key Products
Cladding/Roofing: Corrugated Galvalume
Decking: Hemlock
Finish materials: Cedar shiplap (pool area, sauna, bench); drywall (pool area, gym, washroom); slate tile (steam shower)
Flooring: Slate tile (pool deck, entry, steam shower, washroom); rubber floor (gym)
HVAC: Lifebreath HRV; Solstice air-to-water heat pump; radiant infloor, Price electric duct heater; Harvia (sauna heater)
Humidity Control: Desert Aire (pool dehumidication unit)
Insulation: Rockwool; XPS rigid insulation
Lighting: RAB
Millwork/Trim: Cedar Shiplap
Windows: Aluminum