The place seems to be at the edge of the world, where an expansive sky, shimmering water, and a hilly landscape dotted with spruce and pines are only interrupted by rustic cottages and barns. It is here that Brian MacKay-Lyons, whose firm, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has renovated or designed a cluster of buildings. The architect started buying property some years ago in Upper Kingsburg on the southeastern coast of the province. Known for its hilly, glacial land formations (called drumlins) with panoptic views of the Atlantic Ocean, this peninsula held a primordial attraction for MacKay- Lyons: His French-Acadian forebears had settled there after Champlain’s arrival in 1604.

In 1994, MacKay-Lyons established a camp on the property where architecture students (mostly from Canada and the U.S.) and a few architects and critics would meet two weeks each year for a design-build workshop. The idea was to connect contemporary architectural practice to timeless construction techniques, materials, and vernacular forms. It was soon dubbed Ghost Lab, partly inspired by the eerie look of the new structures at night, and partly by the presence of ruins and other traces of earlier communities nearby.