Most B.C. architects work in urban centres, but Nancy Mackin works in the northernmost reaches of the province, up past Terrace in the Nass River Valley, up where winters are cold and populations sparse.

“It’s the furthest point on the coast you can go in B.C.,” said Mackin, who specializes in landscape and building design for indigenous people.

Four Nisga’a communities totalling 2,000 people live in the area.

“It’s mountainous with a beautiful river, and the culture is steeped in tradition. Lots of traditional ways of learning about the land. Lots of fishing,” West-Vancouver based Mackin said.

The work involves very different considerations from the urban highrises Mackin designed earlier in her career. A health centre treatment room, for example, needs to be much larger than in the city. Patients will often arrive with four or five family members. Keeping extended family members directly involved is not only culturally but medically important in the remote region, Mackin said.

On a recent Health Canada funded project in Inuvik, Mackin researched and helped pass on community knowledge of traditional survival shelters once used along traplines.

She found local experts — one a 94-year-old woman — who dug into their memories for how to build traditional Gwich’in and Inuvialuit arched willow bough structures that used to be clad with moss and animal skins.

“They had complete (memories) of how nice they were, and how warm they were,” Mackin said. The knowledge hadn’t been used in 80 or 90 years, she said. Intriguingly, Mackin found similar turf-clad, dome-shaped ice-houses in the architectural history of Sami communities in northern Norway.

With community assistance, Mackin taught local teenagers to build modernized versions of the Inuit structures in minus 30 C weather, using tarps instead of skins.

“It was quite exciting how relatively easy it was to build. When it was tied all together, you had this incredibly strong structure you couldn’t push over. It’s quite amazing and warm.”

The youth are now able to build themselves emergency shelters in the harsh climate, and at least one community member who hadn’t known about these structures before the project decided to build one over his ice-fishing hole.

Mackin first visited the Nass Valley in the mid-1990s to design a new Nisga’a Nation administration building and became captivated by the area.

“I experienced these different areas of Canada I really didn’t know existed, places in Canada that had a strong culture and different languages.”

One thing led to another, and she went back to school for an interdisciplinary doctorate in architecture, landscape architecture and First Nations studies, and the local community adopted her as Nisga’a and Tsimshian.

Mackin believes people can become more healthy by connecting to the land using architecture as a catalyst.

An architect can “become, in some respects, an advocate for the community,” she said. “You can put things on paper or in a model or in a nice drawing that can become very compelling. Like adding a fitness area to a wellness centre or adding a culturally responsive playground to a daycare centre. Then the people who are supplying the funding for this say ‘You know, that might be a good idea.’”

Mackin often brings model building materials to communities to spark conversation and ideas, and to draw out traditional knowledge for building and managing landscapes.

“You have to be willing to spend the time to let the ideas come gradually,” she said, but people “have traditionally used plants to build buildings in a very ecological way,” and she often uses the ensuing knowledge in new ways.

“What material can we come up with that mimics the properties of moss, a material that actually grows together and becomes not only an insulating layer but also a waterproofing layer? Biomimicry is having a huge impact in architecture right now.”

Many vernacular or traditional rural buildings of the Canadian north have technologies that keep people warm and dry with minimal energy expenditure, she said.

Long tunnel-like entrances contain a depressed area to trap cold air. Raised sleeping areas take advantage of rising warm air. Windbreak walls keep snow from building up against entrances. Mackin is now working with the Canadian High Arctic Research Station and Nunavut communities to create buildings using these ideas.

Mackin has worked on many Nass Valley projects over the last decade, including a couple of health centres, an administration building, some multi-family housing and a daycare centre. Her passions have brought valuable community additions to these projects including ethnobotanical food gardens for the Prince Rupert and Terrace campuses of Northwest Community College, and a playground in Laxgalts’ap, a remote First Nations Nass Valley village. The playground, which took eight years to come to fruition, has a culturally responsive design including climbing platforms with hills and edible plantings, and a cedar climbing structure using a modified longhouse concept.

The Architectural Institute of B.C. recently awarded Mackin the Barbara Dalrymple Memorial Award for Community Service in recognition of her work “with First Nations youth in their communities, listening to their concerns and advocating on their behalf,” AIBC CEO Mark Vernon said.

Up in the remote north of the B.C., this Vancouver architect has created a niche practice that explores solutions to familiar urban issues of health, wellness, community and youth.

“I think architecture is one of the ways to bring them to the forefront of our experience,” she said.

jennylee@vancouversun.com