Every summer for the last dozen years, architect Brian MacKay-Lyons has hosted a design-build workshop at his weekend farm, which sits along a spectacular stretch of rugged coastline in his native Nova Scotia. The point of “Ghost Lab,” so named for the stone ruins of a long-abandoned settlement on the property, is to get architecture students to pick up a hammer and actually make a structure with their own hands, a disappearing skill set in design education today, where “building” is largely virtual.

But this year, MacKay-Lyons transformed his annual Ghost Lab into a far more ambitious summer camp: a three-day conference for nearly 200 architects, students, and academics. This was not your average 21st-century confab. We were off the grid, literally, after the electricity went out the first morning following an epic rainstorm. No worries: A temporary generator was up and running within 30 minutes to fuel the speakers’ PowerPoint presentations of their work. Naturally, we weren’t meeting in a windowless hotel conference room but in an octagonal horse barn from the 1880s that Ghost Lab students restored a few summers back. Daylight seeped in through the ornate cupola and, as Internet connection was spotty, most of the tweeting was carried on by actual birds. A pair of enormous Leonberger dogs and an errant lamb named Darwin occasionally wandered among the rows of seated conference-goers. Lunch was served inside festive white-and-red canvas yurts pitched in a meadow.