Nova Scotia’s B2 Lofts Put a Contemporary Twist on a UNESCO World Heritage Site

At the two-building B2 Lofts in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, architect Brian MacKay-Lyons doesn’t mind that people sometimes can’t tell which building is old and which is new. Never mind the fact that one was completed in 1873 and one in 2020. After all, this is one of only two towns in North America to be named a UNESCO World Heritage site, thanks to its 19th-century British colonial buildings.

"I love that," says MacKay-Lyons, founder of Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects. "Everything’s been done, and you can learn from it. Lunenburg in particular was a shipbuilding place. There’s this great craft tradition. It would be silly not to use it and allow your clients to benefit from it."

Yet upon closer inspection, the newer of the two structures is a playful fusion of traditional and contemporary approaches.

Though its traditional gambrel (also known as mansard) roof matches historic buildings on nearby blocks, the new building’s windows and doors are placed asymmetrically, and a massive sliding exterior shade can cover the glass on two floors at once.

At first, MacKay-Lyons and his team, who also developed the project, briefly considered a more explicitly modern building clad in weathered steel, juxtaposed against the historic structure. "But the UNESCO guy said, ‘What part of wood don’t you understand?’" the architect recalls with a laugh. "So I said, ‘No problem.’ And why not? The ego doesn’t need to be so front and center."

MacKay-Lyons, a winner of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s prestigious Gold Medal, has spent his career thinking about how traditional and modern architectural ideas intersect—and especially thinking about Lunenburg.