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

by Larry Gaudet

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954081208
Publisher:	ORO Editions
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Larry Gaudet has published seven books that includes two novels, a family memoir, and four works that blend fiction and non-fiction and, in the end, defy easy categorization. His scriptwriting through his 300 Dead Cattle subsidiary includes projects with Universal Cable, NBC and various Los Angeles producers, including Highway Bingo and Chernin. His corporate work over 25+ years spans branding, venture financing, speechwriting, investor relations and marketing. He has been a partner in a contemporary art gallery. He has received Canada’s highest journalism awards and recognition from branding juries internationally. His community work includes providing strategic counsel to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the Kingsburg Coastal Conservancy in Nova Scotia, an art therapy institute in Hangzhou, China, and the Art Canada Institute in Toronto. He's a Dalhousie graduate with a diploma from the Canadian Securities Institute. He lives in Canada.

Editorial Reviews

Heir to McLuhan,” – The National Post

“The exact nature of what this estimable writer offers matters less than the fact that he offers it at all - intelligently, vulnerably, often poetically.” —The Globe & Mail

“A [writer] so laden with vision and ideas and cultural insights and narrative experiment that I fell to the floor and cried for mama.” —Quill & Quire

From the Publisher