Hand built Hornby

Hand Built Hornby: Houses, Halls, Models, Memory

Hand Built Hornby Exhibition July 13^th – 16th, with the ADFF screening of Prickly Mountain / My Design-Build Life on the final evening, the Hall is very much at the heart of things.

Hornby Arts is delighted to be working with Helliwell + Smith, Blue Sky Architecture, and Michael McNamara of Blue Sky Design to create Hand Built Hornby, a special exhibition culminating with the July 16 screening of Prickly Mountain / My Design-Build Life with ADFF: Vancouver, the Architecture & Design Film Festival.

This exhibition brings together drawings, models, photographs, archival material, and memory to consider Hornby’s hand-built architecture as more than a collection of unusual houses. These buildings record an island building culture: resourceful, playful, practical, improvised, and deeply connected to site.

In preparing the exhibition, we have been spending time in the Hornby Denman Archives, sourcing wonderful images, speaking with Bob Cain, selecting some of his classic photographs, digging into the architects’ archives, and gathering models, drawings, sourcebooks, and related materials.

Together, these pieces begin to tell a story of houses, halls, studios, and handmade details that were not simply designed and then built but often discovered through making.

Hand Built Hornby asks how we make place. The exhibition looks back to a particular moment in Hornby’s building culture, while also opening up larger questions about land, shelter, skill, imagination, community, and the future…