Brian MacKay-Lyons

Background

Mackay-Lyons was born of part-Acadian heritage in Arcadia, on the French Shore of southwest Nova Scotia and was strongly influenced by the region"s maritime landscape, architecture and functionalist design.

Education

He studied architecture at the Technical University of Nova Scotia (graduating 1978) and received his Master"s in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of California, Los Los Angeles He also studied and worked in China, Japan and Siena, Italy.

Career

In 1983, Mackay-Lyons returned to Nova Scotia to work on vernacular designs and teach at Dalhousie University, where he holds a full professorship in architecture. He founded his own practice in Halifax in 1985 and in 2005 this became Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects Limited after he partnered with Talbot Sweetapple. He has also held numerous visiting academic positions at universities in the United States of America, Canada and Germany.

Best known for his rural homes on the coast of Nova Scotia, Mackay-Lyons has increasingly undertaken a number of larger public commissions since the late 1990s, including the Dalhousie Faculty of Computer Science (1999), Ship"s Company Theatre, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia (2004) and the Canadian High Commission in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2005).

In 1994, Mackay-Lyons began an educational summer design-build program on his family farm near Kingsburg, Nova Scotia entitled the Ghost Architectural Laboratory. As of 2013 the program is no longer taking place, although architecture-related conferences are sometimes held at the same location in the summer.

Ghost was formerly described as an education initiative designed to promote the transfer of architectural knowledge through direct experience - project-based learning taught in the master builder tradition - with emphasis on issues of landscape, material culture, and community.

Achievements

• He is a five-time winner of the Governor General"s Medal for architecture, fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects.