Who: Lola Sheppard
When: 23 September 2021, 13:30 GMT, 20:30 HKT
Where: Live on Zoom (Zoom ID: 910 2489 7131)
Topic: Undisciplined Practices
What is the disciplinary field in which we operate today? What are the tools and modes to operate within this field? This lecture would argue for the possibility of undisciplined practices. Not anti-disciplinary, nor necessarily multi-disciplinary, but instead ask how questions may be provoked outside of the discipline, while the methods of response remain within the discipline. Architecture's entanglement with the environment, economy, and politics should engender new methods of research and design thinking, and new approaches to generating knowledge that moves beyond building as an object and the profession as a service. How can projects emerge at the intersection of research, undisciplined truths and discounted fictions?
Biography:
Lola Sheppard is Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and a founding partner, together with Mason White, of Lateral Office, a Toronto-based practice.
Lateral Office's work operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The firm 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. They have been pursuing research and design on the role of architecture and infrastructure in rural and remote regions, particularly the Canadian North, in the past ten years.
Lateral Office has presented at the Venice Biennale (2021), Oslo Triennale (2019), Seoul Biennale (2017), and Chicago Biennale (2015) and was awarded a Special Mention at the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Lola Sheppard is co-author, together with Mason White, of the books Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Actar Publishers 2017) and Pamphlet Architecture 30: COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism (Princeton Architectural Press 2011). Sheppard and White are also co-editors of the journal Bracket.