Cathleen McGuigan

Photo © Cherish Rosas Click the image above to view of slide show from this year’s Ghost Lab. Every summer for the last dozen years, Halifax architect Brian MacKay-Lyons has run a design-build workshop for architecture students and critics at his weekend farm along the rugged Nova Scotia coast. It’s called Ghost Lab, for the ghostly stone remnants of a long-abandoned settlement on the land. But this year, he decided to host a conference instead, inviting a posse of like-minded peers—mostly North American architects who share his passion for contemporary design that’s well-crafted, connected to its place, and sensitive to

How can the profession play a bigger role on the stage of contemporary American life? As Architectural Record’s new editor in chief, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the June issue. I couldn’t have timed a better entrance: The May issue was the biggest in three years, and the number of loyal readers make the magazine the leader in the field. I welcome the chance to take record forward as an independent journal, as it has been for most of its 120-year history; independence is essential to editorial integrity. Photo: © Erica Lansner I come from the world

A conference organized by Brian MacKay-Lyons aims to push locavore design to the forefront. Photo © Manuel Schnell In lieu of his annual "Ghost Lab" design-build workshops, MacKay-Lyons will host a summer conference at his Nova Scotia farm. In the summer of 1994, Nova Scotia architect Brian MacKay-Lyons and a teaching colleague, Richard Kroeker, took their students at Dalhousie University in Halifax to MacKay-Lyons’s farm and taught them how to actually build a structure with their own hands. It was the first “Ghost Lab,” so named because the land’s rocky ruins mark the ghost of a village, a European settlement