The Globe and Mail

The practice of the Halifax architect Brian MacKay-Lyons is about resistance: rebuffing the weather and resisting the vanity of architecture. In Nova Scotia, where the elements are primal and unpredictable, an exposed edge of a cedar shingle can be flicked off by the wind. So the claddings of houses by MacKay-Lyons are pulled down hard to the ground. But more than that, his primary act of resistance is against the vagaries of architectural style. MacKay-Lyons invests his land-architecture with the simple, honest truths of barns and sheds, producing a version of modernism that looks back through time in order to endure. Architects design buildings. MacKay-Lyons knows how to do that -- as in his design of the Canadian embassy in Bangladesh or the new Academic Resource Centre at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus. But more significant is what MacKay-Lyons creates along the fringes of the Atlantic Ocean, out there, well beyond the globalized metropolis and dehumanized consumerism: He's designing a cultural manifesto. And making it, too.