Join ADFF: Vancouver and Hornby Arts for an evening of film, architecture, and conversation celebrating Hornby’s remarkable design-build history.
ADFF: Vancouver and Hornby Arts present Prickly Mountain: My Design/Build Life, a film by Allie Rood, followed by a post-screening conversation with Bo Helliwell of Helliwell + Smith, Michael McNamara of Blue Sky Design, and Kyle Bergman, ADFF Festival Director. The conversation will be moderated by Adele Weder, Writer and Editor, Art/Architecture/Design.
The evening is part of a wider celebration of Hornby’s hand-built architecture and creative legacy, alongside the Hand-Built Hornby exhibition, on view July 13–16 at the Hornby Island Community Hall.
Prickly Mountain and My Design/Build Life
In the late ’60s and ’70s, a group of architects landed in Vermont with big ideas and a simple plan: to stop just designing buildings and start making them too. Drawing from Bauhaus ideals but rejecting the rigidity of academia, they built by hand, embraced mistakes, and turned architecture into a wild, creative experiment. More than just structures, they built a way of life—one rooted in community, empowerment through doing, and the belief that process matters more than perfection.
Stitched into this story are the decades that shaped design/build, told through the houses that best captured each era. The film moves through the radical homes of the ’60s, where sculptural forms and bold ideas first took shape, into the ’70s, when creativity exploded alongside experiments in alternative energy and materials. By the ’80s, Yestermorrow Design/Build School was founded along with the crown jewel Waitsfield 10 house.
Allie grew up in the middle of it all, playing in half-finished houses where learning happened by trying and failing, and trying again. Years later, she picks up a camera to trace the movement’s history, only to find herself pulled back into its ethos—this time, by building a house of her own. Both nostalgic and full of momentum, the film is a celebration of making cool stuff, messing up, and making more cool stuff—a reminder that the best way to build anything is to just start.
Hand-Built Hornby: Houses, Halls, Models, Memory
Hand Built Hornby Exhibition July 13th – 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…
