The other day Matthew Halliday tweeted a picture of an "extraordinary" new building stretching along the Gottingen Street edge of the sprawling Canadian Forces Base. I stopped to take a look for myself, and, although unfinished, the building appears committed to presenting an exceptionally dreary face to the street. It is the new Consolidated Seamanship Training… Read More

Do you have feelings about fake wood grain finishes? For many of us, who came of age in the 60s and 70s, it was synonymous with cheap, artificial, and unattractive, because we were surrounded by wood-grained crap. Sheets of wood grain paneling covered the walls of innumerable rec rooms, and vinyl siding with embossed wood patterns… Read More

When we decided to buy our house, 25 years ago, one of the reasons was the harbour view framed by an overgrown cemetery across the road. See a few stones poking through the vegetation? That's the old refinery area of Dartmouth on the other shore. And just over to the left is the container port.… Read More

There was a time when most people in Halifax could look at the photo below and know exactly what was happening and where. Today, I'm guessing, not so much. It was taken on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1958, and that's 11-year-old me in the centre, leaning on a pole with my older… Read More

Let it shine In many winters we have traveled to somewhere warmer, but not this year. So let me show you some things that are brightening up our lives in this cold and dark and northern place we choose to live. Sheila and I went downtown one evening last week because I spoke some magic… Read More

In the 1970s I spent a lot of time wandering in downtown Halifax and the old South End, observing and pondering the choices people had made about the design and construction of their homes and businesses. One peculiarity, that you may well have noticed too, is that many of the oldest masonry homes in Halifax… Read More

Does this weather get you thinking about sunnier places and warmer times? I've been remembering a big summer house we visited regularly in the 1990s, that relaxed comfortably in a mature landscape on the Atlantic coast near Chester, Nova Scotia. Our friend Joanne was a friend of the owner's family, and would rent the house… Read More

Recently the design for the redevelopment of the old World Trade and Convention Centre was presented to the city's Design Review Committee. My attention was attracted by the proposed changes to the facade facing Duke Street, because interesting designs for steep east/west streets in downtown Halifax have long been a challenge to architects. Pedestrians are often trudging… Read More

Today, a post about some businesses that created stories, bad and mostly good, that I like to tell. VW lied to us Buying a new car is not our favourite activity but last time, in 2015, Sheila was clear that a nimble, VW Golf, with their new, clean, diesel engine was it. As an ad… Read More