THOMAS FISHER

University of Minnesota Seeing the World Whole

‘‘I’m just trying to see the world whole,’’ says BrianMacKay-Lyons, capturing the significance of hisGhost Architectural Lab as an educationalexperiment and as a critique of beginning designcurriculum. ‘‘Ghost started out of my frustration witharchitectural education,’’ adds MacKay-Lyons. ‘‘Ialmost quit architecture school after I started. I wentinto architecture thinking that it would deal with thelandscape, with making things, with community,which it didn’t.The street outside was moreinteresting than what was going on in the studio.’’

Despite such misgivings, MacKay-Lyonsfinished his B.Arch from the Technical University ofNova Scotia and went on to receive an M.Arch fromUCLA, after which he returned to Halifax to teach.There, he discovered that ‘‘faculty meetings arenever about content, never talking about why weare doing this.’’ Those experiences led him to startthe 2-week summer design ⁄ build program that hedubbed the ‘‘Ghost Lab’’ because of its location onfarmland he owned in Lower Kingsburg, Nova Scotia(Figure 1) amidst the ruins of houses near whereSamuel de Champlain arrived in 1604 to establishthe first French settlements in North America.1

‘‘I started Ghost,’’ he says, ‘‘because first yearstudents needed to know that they are right, thatarchitecture is about landscape, making things, andcommunity’’ instead of what he sees as all toocommon in our schools: the separation of the mindfrom the hand and of the academy from the worldaround it.

This past June, MacKay-Lyons organized aninternational conference—Ghost 13—on the site ofthe previous 12 Ghost Labs to discuss, among otherthings, architectural education.2 One of thearchitects speaking at the conference, Rick Joy,‘‘raised the curriculum issue when he asked: Whatshould we teach?’’ says MacKay-Lyons. ‘‘I’minterested in the one-room schoolhouse approachto architectural education, in which there would bejust three courses: one about place, dealing with theenvironment, landscape, and urbanism; one aboutcraft, addressing technology, making, and material

culture; and one about community, includingclients, culture, and social agency.’’

That three-part pedagogy formed the structureof Ghost 13. Each day of the conference focused onone of those topics—place, craft, and community—under the overarching theme of ‘‘Ideas in Things.’’As architectural education has become ‘‘flakier andflakier, and less about making things,’’ saysMacKay-Lyons, we need to return to ‘‘the idea ofmaking architecture out of local materials and locallabor and making it affordable.’’ At the same time,MacKay-Lyons does not believe students can ‘‘learnto design with hammer in hand. They need a degreeof distance from the job site, and to learn that therole of the architect is not to be the builder, but tobe the designer.’’

That lesson came through clearly from thedesigners MacKay-Lyons assembled for theconference (Figure 2). After an opening keynoteaddress by Kenneth Frampton on the role of place-based architecture as a form of resistance toglobalism, architects Rick Joy, Ted Flato, WendellBurnette, Deborah Berke, and Marlon Blackwell,along with the historian Robert McCarter, talkedabout the influence of place on their architecture.Their work demonstrated how great buildings helpdefine and create the context in which they stand,revealing the realities of a place often unrecognizedbefore the architecture made it visible.

Paradoxically, the popularity of these architectshas brought them commissions far from the placeswhere they work, which has also led them to alterthe forms and materials they commonly use. RickJoy, for instance, showed a shingled and field stonehouse in New England that was quite different fromthe rammed-earth and Corten he employs inArizona. Their examples, however, showed howarchitecture grounded in its place may be the onlyway to engage globalization in a sustainable andculturally appropriate way.

The second keynote speaker, Juhani Pallasmaa,reinforced that idea. In a paper distributed after theconference, he wrote that ‘‘in the Age of Ecology,

the concept of ‘form’ has to be seen as a temporalprocess, or emergent situation, rather than a closedand finite aesthetic entity….I do not support anyromantic bio-morphic architecture. I advocate anarchitecture that arises from a respect of nature inits complexity. . .and from empathy and loyalty toall forms of life and a humility about our owndestiny.’’3 Such sentiments show how the battlelines of architectural education have been redrawn.Instead of the late 20th century division between aformalist avant-garde and a nostalgic rear guard, wenow have a divide between those who continue todesign for what Pallasmaa calls ‘‘the obsessive idealof perpetual growth…(and) the suicidal course ofindustrial civilizations’’ and those who believe thatour ‘‘daily practices and education ha(ve) to befundamentally re-evaluated … giv(ing) up thehubris of regarding ourselves as the centre piece ofthe Universe, and as the Homo Sapiens who know.’’

That division creates a dilemma for architects,evident in the talks during the conference’s secondday. Architects Patricia Patkau, Peter Stutchbury,Brigitte Shim, Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos, andTom Kundig each presented exquisite and often veryexpensive houses as examples of the quality andquantity of craft still possible in today’s construction.The wealth required to fund such work, though, haslargely arisen from the global economy’s concentra-tion of money and power in the hands of a relativelyfew, placing our profession in the awkward positionof depending on the profits of perpetual growth evenas we recognize its unsustainability. And yet, thework these architects showed offered a way past thatdilemma.Their attention to the craft of constructingbuildings applies as much to modest houses as it doesto mega-mansions, making the issue not abouteconomics, but instead about ethics, and theexistential act of humans ‘‘improving the world ratherthan using it up,’’ as MacKay-Lyons described it.

A subsequent panel, which included historianPeter Buchanan, addressed the question of whetherthe beautifully crafted buildings of these architectsrepresented a new ‘‘arts and crafts’’ and whether

13 FISHER Journal of Architectural Education,pp. 13–16 ª 2012 ACSA

that new genre aligned or conflicted with thegrowing use of digital design and fabrication. Mostparticipants refused to polarize these issues. AsMacKay-Lyons said, ‘‘It’s always ‘both-and’: bothdigital and analog, mind and hand, past and future.’’At the same time, the conference goers seemed inagreement that our professional responsibilityextends beyond the wealthy clients who commissionus to the billions of people who cannot.

In the third keynote, Glenn Murcutt confrontedthat issue head on by observing that our primaryresponsibility rests with doing great architecture.MacKay-Lyons underscored that later when he said:‘‘Architecture needs both artists and activists, butevery architect has to decide which is primary and

which is secondary.’’ The architect-educators whospoke on the final day of the conference had clearlyanswered that question. Andrew Freear, DanRockhill, Steve Badanes, Richard Kroeker, and BrianMacKay-Lyons all provided moving and at timeshighly entertaining accounts of their efforts, mostlywith students, to design and build beautiful projectsoften for people of modest means in isolatedlocations. This, too, had a ‘‘both-and’’ quality asmost of them showed artful structures constructedwith activist intentions, building a sense ofcommunity in the process of their building forcommunities.

A sense of community pervaded Ghost 13. Thespeakers, most of them alumni of previous Ghost

Labs, as well as the audience of well over a hundredarchitects, educators, critics, and students displayeda degree of camaraderie that came not only frombeing together for 3 days in an isolated location,but also from sharing a common purpose andmission. As Pallasmaa described it, ‘‘the bestexamples of architecture arise from a deepunderstanding of the place and its climatic andnatural characteristics … project(ing) a specialbeauty, the beauty of human reason and ethics.’’4

Creating that beauty in a world torn betweenthe self-indulgent excesses of a few and theundeserved deprivations of so many may seemdaunting, but it has not deterred these architects,MacKay-Lyons included. ‘‘We have to will paradise

1. Aerial of Kingsburg, Nova Scotia. (Photograph by Manuell Schnell).

Seeing the World Whole 14

into existence,’’ he says, ‘‘however utopian that maysound.’’ And the Ghost Lab site stands as evidence:an entire landscape conceived and constructed byMacKay-Lyons and his colleagues and students overthe last 17 years, comprising everything from aboathouse and barn to cabins and cabanas tohouses and horse pastures (Figures 3 and 4).‘‘There is aesthetic pleasure in seeing thingswhole,’’ says MacKay-Lyons, ‘‘with designing andmaking, practice and teaching, family andcommunity as one.’’ The Ghost Lab, he adds,‘‘reminds people that it is possible and that they,too, can live in this way.’’

MacKay-Lyons sees the small-scale work of theGhost Lab as relevant to the large-scale problemswe face. ‘‘Small projects can change the world,’’ hesays. ‘‘Look at the impact of Glenn Murcutt,’’ whohas transformed our thinking about climate-responsive design with a number of modest-size

houses. Such aspirations bring to mind CIAM andTeam 10—20th century gatherings by a few of theworld’s leading architects and critics to formulatenew directions for architecture and urban design.5

Unlike those earlier efforts, Ghost 13 did notproduce a manifesto or charter, but it did identify acoherent architectural and educational response tothe homogeneity, unsustainability, and inequality ofthe global economy.

That made the location of the conferenceparticularly prescient. When Champlain landed onthat Nova Scotia coast a little over 400 years ago,he—along with the British, who landed inJamestown a few years later—set in motion anew set of global economic relations, extractingresources, exploiting native people, andextinguishing species in the process. In just 20generations, these practices have brought us to aprecipice, in which North Americans now require

the equivalent of nearly five Earths to meet ourresource requirements and to absorb our wasteand pollution.6 Our global ‘‘Ponzi Scheme’’ withthe planet, in other words, exceeds the Earth’scarrying capacity and like all such schemes, thisone seems likely to collapse. We can continueto pretend this will not happen, or we canbegin to envision life after the globaleconomy, as the Ghost 13 participants havebegun to do.

They showed what living in our ecologicalfootprint might be like. People would live muchmore modestly, in much closer communities.Buildings would respond to their climate andculture, and would be built by local craftspeopleusing local, renewable, and recyclable materials.Settlements would be more compact, able tosustain themselves through local economies andecologies.

2. Ghost 13 participants. (Photograph by Cherish Rosas).

15 FISHER

That scenario may sound unrealistic, butcircumstances seem likely drive us in this direction,whether or not we chose to go. After the fall ofRome—a fall that Canadian political scientist ThomasHomer-Dixon attributes at least in part to Rome’sexhausting the environmental resources on which itdepended—Europeans regrouped into smallcommunities that lived locally and sustainably out ofnecessity.7 Ghost 13 suggested that architects have akey role to play in this transition. We have the capacityto help people overcome their fear of suchmomentous change and to show them that a healthier,happier, and as MacKay-Lyons puts it, a ‘‘morewholesome existence’’ can come of it. Located at theplace where a new global economic order began400 years ago, Ghost 13 represented a new kind ofbeginning for design, one that goes far beyondbuildings to ask the question of how we should live ifhumanity hopes to be here 400 years from now.

Notes

1. MacKay-Lyons, Brian. Ghost, Building an Architectural Vision (New

York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

2. http://www.cvent.com/events/ghost-13-international-architecture-

conference-ideas-in-things/event-summary-0ed913f123d84e5da3ff75

96ab1ddcb3.aspx

3. Pallasmaa, Juhani. ‘‘Architecture and the Human Nature, Searching

for a Sustainable Metaphor,’’ Ghost 13 paper, 2011.

4. Ibid

5. Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Smithson, Alison, ed., Team 10

Primer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

6. http://oneplanetdc.org/footprint.html

7. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down, Catastrophe, Creativity

and the Renewal of Civilization (New York: Knopf, 2006).

3. Ghost 1, 1994. (Courtesy of Brian MacKay-Lyons).

4. Ghost 6, 1999. (Photograph by Jamie Steeves. Permission courtesy of the author).

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