It all started with a 2010 radio interview. “Architecture can express our culture’s highest aspirations—whether it’s a house or an important public building,” architect Brian MacKay-Lyons told CBC host Don Connolly. That profound sense of optimism was exactly what Scott Armour McCrea, who happened to be listening, wanted in a designer for a new 450,000-square-foot mixed-use development in Halifax, Nova Scotia. With four Record Houses in his portfolio, the founder of the firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects is best known for deft residential work informed by the area’s vernacular barns and fishing shacks. But in his office’s downtown neighborhood in the same city, far from glacial drumlins and craggy shorelines, he turned to a very different maritime lexicon that is deeply intertwined with Nova Scotia’s identity.
Queen’s Marque, as the project is called, occupies a sizable downtown blockfront along Halifax Harbour that is highly charged with technological, mercantile, and maritime history. To the north is George Street, a civic axis that terminates on one end with the Old Town Clock and, on the other, the Cable Wharf, built in 1913 to receive transatlantic messages from undersea cables. To the south is Prince Street and the neighboring Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, where the CSS Acadia is permanently moored. Between them—where Queen’s Marque stands today—was once King’s Wharf, the traditional point of arrival for the British monarch, but, more recently, a parking lot.
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