CH O I CES H OM E
“A culture learns over hundreds of years
and thousands of people, so there’s this
kind of collective intelligence in the vernacular,” says Brian MacKay-Lyons. The
Halifax-based architect has made a career of
designing structures so suited to their sites
that they could have been built by long-ago
natives—an impression belied only by their
crisp, modern lines. A postage stamp–sized
summer house for the Fischer family, completed in 2005 on Nova Scotia’s South Coast,
encapsulates his way of working.
The South Coast region is a 200-mile
stretch of craggy Atlantic shoreline that’s host
to Canada’s mildest climate east of the Rockies. But this is still Canada, so the weather
does get dicey. “Here it snows and the snow
turns to rain, and then you have a wet,
eaves, creating ice dams and leaks. For the
Fischers, the architect was also aiming for
cultural specificity, which he describes as
“a modest aesthetic, which is a kind of
ethic here in the Maritimes—not to put on
airs, not to be pretentious.” That point of
view dovetailed perfectly with the client’s
need to stay affordably small. With few
other limitations, conceptualization flew as
MacKay-Lyons and client Ralph Fischer,
fueled by coffee at a local dive, sketched
out the 1,000-square-foot home.
In the spirit of modesty, the house is a
12-foot-wide, wood-framed box clad in
an aluminum-and-steel alloy. The main
structure is devoted to dwelling space; three
differently sized concrete volumes on its
west and east elevations contain the hearth,
bathroom, and kitchen.
The offshoot gestures may seem capricious, but, in fact, they
thoughtfully respond to place. Located on
a small promontory that emerges from a
spruce forest overlooking a sliver of beach,
the area is littered with giant rocks left by
a receding glacier. “Imagine these granite
A RUGGED COTTAGE GOES GREEN
BY EMULATING ITS PREDECESSORS.
heavy snow on the roof,” MacKay-Lyons
explains. The condition precludes building houses with eaves: With temperatures
hovering around freezing, snow would
melt on the roof and stay frozen atop the
64 | Feb/Mar/07 plentymag.com
boulders rolling around in the glacier like
semiprecious stones in a tumbler,” MacKayLyons says. “They’re like big marbles sitting
on the ground. Walking among them, you
feel like Alice in Wonderland.”
Rather than tackle the energy-hogging task
of removing the boulders, MacKay-Lyons
placed the house among them. And its
concrete volumes serve as a kind of abstract
reference to these primeval neighbors. The
aesthetic effect is heightened in the bedroom,
where a long, horizontal window above the
bed reveals a massive boulder sitting just a
foot from the house’s northern side. The
closeup view of granite acts like a headboard,
reminding the Fischers that they inhabit a
special little enclave among the rocks.
These concrete elements are also devoted
multitaskers—quite literally the strong
shoulders that make the house work. For
one, they keep it standing, by offering
resistance to the ocean winds that would
otherwise transport a narrow wood-frame
structure from Wonderland to Oz. The
concrete also provides important thermal
mass that drives down fuel bills: Much like
adobe, these thick walls absorb sunlight