Lola Sheppard, professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and a founding partner (with Mason White) of the Toronto-based practice Lateral Office, will deliver the annual Fumihiko Maki Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series.
Sheppard’s work operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. She is committed to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project—social, ecological, or political. In particular, she has been pursuing research and design work on the role of architecture in rural and remote regions, particularly the Canadian North, for the past ten years.
Sheppard’s work has been exhibited extensively and she has lectured across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Lateral Office has presented at the Seoul Biennale (2017) and the Chicago Biennale (2015), and they were awarded a Special Mention at the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture. They received a PA award in 2013 and the 2012 Holcim Gold for Sustainable Construction for North America, for their work on the Arctic. Sheppard is co-author, with White, of the book Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Actar 2017) and of Pamphlet Architecture 30, COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2011). Sheppard is also co-editor of the journal Bracket.