Modern, Again: The Benda House & Garden in Chicagoland

Sherry McKay (author + series co-editor) Sherry McKay is an architectural historian and Professor Emerita (2019) of the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She is the recipient of a Killam Teaching Award and inaugural Chair of the architecture program in SALA (2006-09). Her work on west coast architecture and French colonial architecture of the modern era appears in North American and French publications. She has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Vancouver and the Contemporary Art Gallery. She was organizer and author of the catalogue for Assembling Utopia: packaging the home, an exhibition at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo in 2000. From 2010 to 2017 she was the Book Review Editor of the UK journal Building Research and Information. Currently, she is exploring the notion of "building fictions," history told via the material aspects and vicissitudes of architecture.

The genesis, development and life-long occupation of the McIntyre house, built in 1972 as part of a multiple-dwelling subdivision, provides possible answers to some very pressing contemporary design questions. How might one live near the city and respectful of nature? How might efficiently built dwellings also be spacious and dense site occupation still allow privacy. This history is recounted through text augmented by photographs and site diagrams, house sections and plans. They reveal a modern architecture on the west coast that resulted from an interplay of both the physicality of the land and a culturally imbued landscape.