Skyroom: The Journey of Brian And Marilyn Mackay-Lyons at Shobac, a Seaside Village on the Edge of Architectural and Utopian Possibility

In SkyRoom, novelist Larry Gaudet tells the story of Shobac, a seaside village recognized internationally as the masterwork of famed Canadian architect Brian Mackay-Lyons. In partnership with his wife Marilyn Mackay-Lyons and their family, he has built a unique community over the granite ruins of a historic settlement on the fogbound coast of Nova Scotia. Among the structures at Shobac are homes, barns, studios, cottages, fishing shacks, a boathouse, even a schoolhouse, all designed in Mackay-Lyons’s compelling architectural language that fuses contemporary Modernism with Nova Scotia building traditions. SkyRoom is written in a new genre that Gaudet calls magic architectural realism, blending fact with historical fiction in presenting the lives of early inhabitants and visitors to the Shobac area, including Samuel de Champlain, a Mi’kmaq mystic, an Acadian carpenter and other lively characters whose ghostly presence swirl in the untold myths of this coastal Shangri-La. More provocatively, Gaudet orchestrates imaginary conversations between Mackay-Lyons and legendary figures in architecture – Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van Der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore and others – all towards providing a novel perspective on what goes into building communities and homes worth living in. Read more