MacKay-Lyons was born of part-Acadian heritage, growing up in Arcadia, a small river village of about four hundred people on the French Shore of southwest Nova Scotia.
In 1990 they renovated an old gas station on Falkland Street in Halifax, to use as an office, while also building an additional four town homes on site to finance the project.
[4] MacKay-Lyons seeks to implement aspects of traditional practice in the relationships of the firm, such as encouraging the dynamic of apprentice to master-builder, as opposed to intern to architect.
[9] Before MacKay-Lyons' partnership with Sweetapple, he was focused dominantly on vernacular rural homes on the coast of Nova Scotia, that he has described as being[6] rooted in culture, yet contemporary.
To accommodate for Talbot Sweetapple and the subsequent growth of their firm, they increasingly began to undertake urban, public projects in the late 1990s, including the Dalhousie Faculty of Computer Science (1999), Ship's Company Theatre, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia (2004), the Canadian High Commission in Dhaka, Bangladesh (2005) and the TUNS (Dalhousie) Architecture School.
[13] The varying scale of these types of projects are continually linked through their consideration to[14] landscape, climate and material culture as elements of place.
"[2] In 1994, MacKay-Lyons began an educational summer design-build program on his family farm near Kingsburg, Nova Scotia entitled the Ghost Architectural Laboratory.
[14] Ghost was formerly described[16] as an education initiative designed to promote the transfer of architectural knowledge through direct experience – project-based learning taught in the master builder tradition – with emphasis on issues of landscape, material culture, and community.
In the Maritime provinces of Canada, story telling is commonplace in daily life, and was also adopted by MacKay-Lyons in his building practices, and in the design-build.
[9] Each year it was run, a group of students, professors and architects were invited to participate, and were to divide their time equally between designing and building the structure.
He draws inspiration from observing unique qualities of the surroundings, such as[18] climate, land form or cultural history, and uses this as a basis for his design work, as they are already existing and waiting to be discovered.