Ghost 1
descendant, established long before the first official attempts at colonization and settlement. Champlain anchored only briefly at the mouth of the LaHave River before moving south to the Bay of Fundy, but while there he drew a chart of the river’s mouth and the harbor. The act of tracing (“the first drawing he made in the New World”) turns a ghost story into an architectural tale. Before the digital age permeated the practice of architecture, architects used to speak of the “skeleton” or the “bones” of a building—these were the generating lines and structure of a work of architecture, traced lightly onto the fresh vellum. Layer after layer of drawing would “flesh it out,” adding “skin” and systems, dimensions, and all the other information necessary for construction. Such drawings, created over months by many hands working on the same sheets, revealed shadows of earlier drawings that appeared on a sheet that had been worked over, erased, and reworked. These ghosts were memories, relics of bygone schemes—ancestors, if you will, of the building being finalized on the page. Today such ghosted drawings are only ghost stories, as each architectural drawing comes fresh from the plotter without visible trace of earlier schemes, or decisions, or changes of heart. Plotted sheets are unencumbered by memories of the past, yet in the design process, architects still use trace to carry one set of building studies forward into the next. In analyzing a site, they look at layers of habitation, seeing the cumulative traces of human settlement as a palimpsest of marks made on the surface of the earth, scraped clean with each successive wave of settlement to be made anew, yet carrying the faint records of earlier patterns. On the Ghost site, MacKay-Lyons works with exactly such traces, identifying the lines, residues, and marks of earlier buildings to anchor—or better, to root—his new works in this time-scarred landscape.