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.