45 Degrees North | Ghost Studio

For the last eight years, Bryan McKay Lyons has been offering up some of his estate to architects, students and wary travelers to participate in a two week summer design/build studio which he describes as "a crash course in material culture." It started as a month long "free lab" for architecture students at the Technical University of Nova Scotia in 1994. What evolved is an old school, master-apprentice, primitive crastman event that produces an ever changing, richly evocative landscape.

All the projects free themselves of any climate control restraints in favor of open air, essentially programless follies, but their meaning certainly makes up for their lack of function. Our own Thomas Fisher once wrote on the very primal human expression that the Ghost Studio embodies. "Both abstractly modern and culturally rooted, [the studio] undermines the apparent opposition between the two...the desire to live lightly on the land, to see change as an inevitable part of life, and to view freedom rising from a reduction of one's material possessions." Perhaps that's the best explanation for my obsession with outbuildings. They seem to afford a freedom of self expression within the basic instincts of our vernacular.

Oh, and that little number pictured at the top was partially designed and built by Minnesota's own Bryan Anderson of SALA Architects.