Marshal Studio Addition © Richard Kroeker

My involvement with this project was as a student at Dalhousie University in a construction and materials course with Professor Richard Kroeker. It was a formative project in further developing my interest in structural form and cultural context. We constructed the bentwood truss studio addition for Albert and Murdina Marshal in a Mi'Kmaq First Nations community on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The structure and form is based on Mi'Kmaq First Nations traditional structures.

"Young spruce and pine trees with a base diameter of not more than 150 mm, while still green and pliable, are fashioned as curved arch truss members. Pairs of these trusses are joined to form a lightweight structural arch which, when deployed in series, form a sinuous, lyrical vaulted space. As Halifax-based architect and critic Christine Macy has noted, 'For Kroeker architecture is not a rhetoric of shapes and forms that signify culture; rather it develops out of a way people work with the material around them. In his view, technology is not neutral, it is an economically and geographically contingent process.' Kroeker notes that while the First Nations people he works with do not see the architecture as representative or symbolic of their culture, they recognize in it characteristics that resonate with their relationship to place."¹

1. John McMinn and Marco Polo, 41° To 66°, Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture in Canada, (Cambridge Galleries, Design at Riverside, 2006) p. 54.