Lecture: Lola Sheppard, Lateral Office, University of Waterloo School of Architecture

Lola Sheppard is an architect and educator based in Toronto. She received her B.Arch from McGill University and her M.Arch from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is currently Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, School of Architecture in Canada. She is a founding partner of Lateral Office (2003) with Mason White, a firm dedicated to the productive overlap of architecture, landscape, infrastructure and urbanism. She is also a co-director of InfraNet Lab, a research laboratory dedicated to probing the spatial by-products of contemporary resource logistics (2008). InfraNet Lab an editor of the journal Bracket: Architecture, Environment, Digital Culture. Her work examines the production of ‘fourth natures’ – landscapes and ecologies that exist as mutant products of politics and technological enhancement. Lola Sheppard has been pursuing ongoing design research entitled Next North: Infrastructures for a Shifting Terrain, which examines infrastructures’ capacity to sustain local ecosystems and cultures in the Canadian North. Lola is co-editor of Bracket [goes Soft] and Bracket [at Extremes] (2011). She was awarded the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada 2012 Young Architect Award. Lateral Office was awarded the Pamphlet Architecture no. 30, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2011), the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York (2011), and the Canadian Prix de Rome (2010).