Lateral Office

Recorded on October 4, 2024. Read a transcript of the episode below.

Lola Sheppard and Mason White launched Lateral Office in 2003 in Toronto. They describe it as an experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Lateral Office is committed to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, always engaging in the wider context and climate of a project. They have an extensive body of work focusing on design relationships between public realm architecture and the environment, especially in northern indigenous and rural communities. Sheppard and White are founding editors of the journal Bracket. They co-authored Pamphlet Architecture 30:Coupling in 2011 as well as Many Norths: Spatial Practice in the Polar Territory in 2016. 

They’re both celebrated educators. Sheppard is a professor at the University of Waterloo and White at the University of Toronto. Their studio has been recognized with several awards, including a 2023 Canadian Architect Award, a 2021 Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction Silver Award, a 2016 National Urban Design Award, and a 2011 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York, among others. Lateral Architecture was selected to represent Canada with Arctic Adaptations at the 2014 Venice Biennale in Architecture, where they received special mention for this project. They have also participated in the Chicago, Seoul and Tallinn Architecture Biennials, and the Oslo Architecture Triennial. Their recent work includes Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub (2023), Michipicoten First Nation public realm and place-keeping project, exhibitions in New Zealand and at the Venice Biennale, and an installation for Exhibit Columbus.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:22

Hello, and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. My guests in this episode are Lola Sheppard and Mason White. Welcome Lola and Mason.

Mason White  01:31

Thank you for having us. 

Lola Sheppard  01:32

Thanks for having us.

Miljački  01:34

Lola Sheppard and Mason White launched Lateral Architecture in 2003 in Toronto. They describe it as an experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape and urbanism. Lateral Architecture is committed to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, always engaging in the wider context and climate of a project. They have an extensive body of work focusing on design relationships between public realm architecture and environment, especially in northern indigenous and rural communities. Lola and Mason have been founding editors of the journal Bracket. They co-authored Pamphlet Architecture 30, titled Coupling, as well as Many Norths: Spatial Practice in the Polar Territory in 2016. They’re both celebrated educators. Lola is a professor at University of Waterloo and Mason at the University of Toronto. Their studio has been recognized with several awards, including a 2023 Canadian architect Award, a 2021 Holcim Foundation for sustainable construction Silver Award, a 2016 National Urban Design Award and a 2011 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, among others. Lateral Architecture was selected to represent Canada with Arctic adaptations at the 2014 Venice Biennale in architecture, where they received special mention for this project. They have participated in the Venice, Chicago, Seoul and Tallinn architecture biennials, as well as in the Oslo architecture triennial. Their recent work includes Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub, completed in 2023, Michipicoten First Nation Public Realm and Place-keeping project, exhibitions in New Zealand and at the Venice Biennale, as well as an installation for Exhibit Ohio. As always, we will likely talk about some of these, but first we will start with the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission and Lateral’s work to date requires us to immediately expand the definition of commissions to encompass exhibitions and research. So, and if you have not had to refuse or back away from something yet, can you imagine it happening and on what grounds?

White  03:56

Well, again, thanks so much for having us. We’re fans of the podcast, and so really honored to be a part of season three, or whatever, or four! Whatever we’re up to these days. We haven’t walked away from a job, and I love imagining the sort of drama of, you know, having a roll of drawings and just throwing it on the table and saying, that’s it, I quit, and walk off. I love the drama of that. Sadly, we haven’t had that moment. Maybe there have been moments where in arguing our various positions on a project, Lola and I may have stormed out of a room, but usually 10 minutes later, we’re back at the table working on something. So in short, there hasn’t been a dramatic walk away. But I would say maybe by initiating our practice at such a, maybe upon reflecting, somewhat ambitious scale, like we began, very much at an infrastructural scale, we were really interested, maybe before planetary urbanism was an actual category of thinking, we were really interested in thinking about mega-regional scale, but almost within the regions that are more remote or lesser populated, or more, or there’s greater sociopolitical complexities. And so by maybe making our first moves in that area, let’s say our phones were not ringing off the hook by various leaders of, or those running these places saying, Hey, can you help us solve this problem? So we were kind of operating in a way that we didn’t really have to refuse, because we were already at the margins. We weren’t at the center. We weren’t rubbing elbows around conventional commissions, but I’d be interested to hear what Lola’s take would be on that. But my first thought is almost that our, an act of refusal was in, I don’t know, it sounds arrogant to say, not daring, but let’s say, starting at such a ridiculous scale that it that inherently created refusals within it by others. But Lola, I’ll let you clear up my mistakes. No, I

Sheppard  06:06

No, I think that’s true, and I think we began, like a lot of firms, doing competitions. I think the one thing, if we were answering the question fully, although Mason’s right, we have never walked away or turned down a commission. But I think early on, we knew we wanted to deal with public realm, with territory and so doing, for instance, private houses, which others in our city do so much better than us, we thought this is not going to be our field of expertise. And especially as academics, where you have a kind of responsibility to be pushing the limits, at least a little bit on what architecture should be investigating, I think is aligned with what Mason’s describing. But we also moved away from doing competitions, which is how we started off, like most young firms, I don’t even know if we were a firm back then, and started self-generating work. And because we were self-generating work, we could define the questions, the scale. And so, as Mason said, perhaps in a slightly megalomaniac way, decided, you know, we would look at the entire Salton Sea, or, you know, whatever, the entire Canadian North as a starting point. So, yes.

Miljački  07:26

Well, I think we should then talk about the way that you define practice and think of clients. I’m going to put that in italics, maybe as your practice has a research process, but it also outputs research and design is in involved in that research. But can you locate the figure of the client for us, with respect to your work?

White  07:51

Client sounds so formal. I mean, I think there are publics. There are various publics that the work engages, and I still don’t even think we really have clients. I think even within Inuusirvik, our first large building that we’ve completed, even that it’s really intersecting publics, different generations and different kind of agents in the city, and people use it differently. So obviously, dealing with a non-specific client means a lot of listening on our part. And I think actually that the steepest learning curve, bridging between research and practice, has been something that they don’t teach in school, and we don’t really integrate into curriculum. But the art of listening, right? We teach the art of talking. We teach the art of alibis and what’s your justification this idea, but this skill of listening is a very difficult skill. We all think we listen well, right? We have friends, we hear a conversation, and we, oh, I heard you, and I listened to that. But I think deep listening, as Pauline Oliveros called it, right, in this kind of ambient music phenomenon, deep listening, is a powerful exercise, and I think that is how we’re trying to engage various publics, is through this listening or engagement exercises, or there’s a lot more back and forth. Some people call it codesigning with a quote client. I’ll put in the air quotes on a podcast. And I think that listening exercise is what allows for the public’s plural, the plurality of that to contribute, would be maybe one response to, are there clients? I probably think yes. Do we know all of our clients? No, but that’s interesting, not knowing your clients is, I think probably a lot of architecture operates in that way, where you don’t always know the client in that sense, but…

Sheppard  10:04

In a way, especially in the research projects, which encompasses the exhibitions, the self-generated projects, in a way, the research is, the research topic is the client, right? Like, how do you do justice to a topic that is complex, that we often come to without familiarity? I mean, when we began our work in the North, we did it really naively. We knew very little. And because we’re, we’ve, I think, always been interested in looking at topics that we thought were overlooked by the design disciplines. We at one point thought no one’s looking at the Canadian North. I mean, historians and anthropologists were, but architects at the time weren’t. Now, many are. And so the question of, how do you listen, even to the research topic? How do you do justice? I would say, in a way, the research subject is maybe also a client.

Miljački  11:04

I mean, maybe I’m going to link this to this question of architectural activism that you yourselves brought up in your recent Perspecta article, relatively recent. And there you say, the question is how the architect aligns architecture within the spectrum of activism, and how do processes, techniques and tools contribute to disciplinary innovation? And I would just like to pose these questions to your practice.

White  11:30

I mean, yeah, it’s always good to reflect on putting your money where your mouth is. Are you practicing what you preach? But many of the tools of activism, I would say Ana, are really about flattening the hierarchy of both how you practice and how again, air quotes, clients or publics are agents within the work itself, and whether it’s the subjectivity that Lola’s speaking to, where it’s the subject itself, as though the subject is an entity, which is a beautiful idea. I love that interpretation that she’s putting on the table is that what tools might be useful, and so we’re often bringing with us a kind of shoebox of, I don’t know, fragments of a model, or a shoebox of a set of drawings or traces or layers of things that can be laid on a table. We’re often sitting on the floor or sitting in a kitchen. Lola did this amazing set of engagement sessions this year up in Arviat, which has a population, I believe, of about 3000, less than 3000 people. And she did these kitchen table talks talking about housing, and brought around shoebox and rolls of drawings and sort of, and these little cork models that we made, and would just sit around a table and just like move pieces around, almost like a game board, saying, Well, if this is here, where can that go? And if that’s there, and how might we do this? And do you use this space? And what about shortcuts and crisscrossing the site. How would you do that? So I think the tools are really, I don’t know, gamification or allowing for changeability or modification, rather than arriving with fixed solutions, rather than saying, here is the solution, and it’s a kind of marketing or a sales pitch, or, here’s our design vision. Instead, it’s like, we think you’re trying to do something like this, but it’s incomplete. Can you help us integrate these non-integrated pieces? Or can you help complete the story? Like, if it’s a good storytelling, every project is like, how can you help us complete that? So I think the tools of activism are really flattening relationships and opening up disciplinary invitations and non-specialist, specialized perceptions of the discipline, as though there was experts in the room. And that was kind of the Many Norths project too, it was about non or an inviting, flattening architectural expertise and inviting in hunters and mussel harvesters and truck drivers that drive on ice roads and sea lift companies and how they deal with logistics and again, really horizontalizing expertise as a discipline to allow for influence from outside of its autonomy. We know about the discussions of architectural autonomy, disciplinarily and a lot have anxiety about that, like they want to hold on to that autonomy, but I think that that’s always been our project is against that autonomy.

Sheppard  14:45

I think part of the activism is even just, and this picks up on Mason’s maybe last comments, is expanding the questions that architects ask. It was interesting, I was in a seminar just this week, and students were expressing this sort of hesitation about pushing the envelope in architecture, and I think they were speaking about it as future practitioners, saying, you know, but if you get it wrong, it’s so expensive for the client, and, well, it partly made me, it saddened me, but we had this whole discussion that the whole job of architects, I mean, particularly as academics, but also as practitioners, is to move the needle, whether in a small way or in a very large way about what we do in the discipline. And so I think asking, sort of looking at these areas of architecture that have been overlooked was also maybe a form of activism, of saying we don’t want to look at the city. We’re going to look at the rural which is overlooked, and we’re going to look at the North which is overlooked. And then, as Mason said, we’re going to expand the, we’re going to ask, how do you draw economic forces or climatic forces? To then be able to think about how they inform design in tangible ways.

Miljački  16:15

Great. Let’s at least for a moment talk about your beautiful exhibitions and their accompanying printed material. So your work is often, as you describe it, about the public realm and at the intersection of territorial, infrastructural and architectural, but also, and almost as often, its public domain is the space of the exhibition, where research and proposals are exposed to disciplinary and the general audience. So what kind of medium is exhibition? I mean, I’m particularly interested in this as someone who also occupies this space.

Sheppard  16:55

I mean, I think there’s… different exhibitions have different publics, and perhaps a shortcoming of the many biennales we’ve been part of, and many people have been part of, is you’re really speaking to your peers or to people working in associated fields. There is certainly, especially in the things like the Venice Biennale, but all of them, there’s a general public, but it’s probably most often design-inclined public. And so in a, I’m thinking about a very banal exhibition, or simple exhibition I mounted in Newfoundland as part of a research grant, which was much more kind of, probably reaching a slightly broader public. And what we made, I mean, there, I was a curator. I wasn’t, we weren’t producing the content. But it is interesting to think about the audiences of different exhibitions, and the conversations one is having with those publics. To go back to Mason’s comment.

White  18:02

It’s a great question also, about medium and media, which I think is your, I know is your interest certainly at the Critical Broadcasting Lab, is really ultimately about media. This is a form of exhibition that we’re doing now. But I think our project, if I were to describe it, what its intent was, exhibition-wise, is to draw the things that we can’t see. Like, I think almost all the drawing we do is to draw what we can’t yet see. Now I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, but to us, this means drawing invisible connections, like wires, politics, economics, we expand it obviously, ecologies, like the whole coupling Pamphlet Architecture publication, was a celebration of drawing what you can’t see, and by drawing it, you’re trying to reveal it to yourself, but then you’re inviting others into that, the revelation, if you will, of seeing, Oh, my goodness, I did not know that this home… I mean, even the exhibition we did in Venice Biennale this past year with Arctic Design Group, who we collaborated on this study about Arctic home types and their connection to the territory, was to draw these invisible dependencies and forces that are either sometimes functioning at a kind of geological scale, or they’re functioning at a geopolitical scale, or it’s just a climatological scale, whatever it might be. And to represent them, to try to draw them, is to show them to someone else. And so in some ways, the exhibition is a revelation of what we can’t see. We see it as a chance to, like the project in New Zealand. The exhibition, New Zealand was also another kind of representation of these unseen frictions between indigenous land ownership models, which is totally different among Maori people in New Zealand, its something that Canada can learn a lot from, and the US as well, in terms of recognition about how, like, rivers have rights, right? This is a powerful idea. And how can you draw that as a force if a river has a right? And so, part of it was really about trying to show these hidden impacts and these hidden forces upon architecture that can make really inspiring new directions for architecture. It’s not to say, hey, architecture is held by these things, but in fact, they can empower architecture to evolve and to not continue along its kind of ignorant path of, well, you know, mechanical systems are just hidden in the ceiling, so we don’t know about that. And how I’m getting my electrical is just hidden in the city. Who knows, and where my wastewater is going, but to see these as things that could be integrated is to recognize them.

Miljački  21:02

You’re focusing on the didactic dimension of the exhibit. I’m also interested in how you think about the role of convention or aesthetics in them.

Sheppard  21:18

I think all of architecture is storytelling, and particularly in exhibitions, you’re storytelling and because we’re often choosing, perhaps complex issues, like, networks of electronic waste in the world, or looking at the entire circumpolar region, which Hashim [Sarkis] had invited us to do for Venice. In terms of the medium, I think finding new ways to draw, new ways to make models. In Venice in 2014 we were looking at physical models that then had projections on them, so finding hybrid techniques that tell stories. And I think this is, I mean, I think we would pride ourselves in saying we’ve never repeated exactly. We learn from our previous exhibitions, but they’re all pretty particular because they’re trying to tell very distinct and usually fairly different stories. And so the drawings, in a way also need to be invented, or the drawing types and the drawing conventions, or the model conventions.

Miljački  22:36

How do you think about the criteria by which you engage and don’t engage projects or work-slash-research and have those criteria changed over the last 20 years of your practice?

Sheppard 22:51

I think when we started, I was mentioning, well, we did competitions, but we quickly moved into self-generated work, where, in a way, you can control all the parameters, right? You can define what you’re looking at, what you read as being the issue of import. In that context, you can define how long you take, what your outputs are, I think it has been interesting and exciting for us to… even in the research grants, I would say in the last eight years, even research grants are now much more partnership grants, which is literally, actually a category of grant in Canada, where you are working with a local partner that has a shared stake in the research question, but they are bringing their own tangible concerns, and then you, as a researcher, are bringing your sets of concerns. And it’s a kind of beautiful balance, because you’re no longer working in a kind of vacuum of what you as a researcher just happened to deem is interesting and that was one sort of evolution, and then now to be working with, quote, unquote, real clients on projects that come with their own constraints, but we’ve been incredibly lucky in the Michipicoten project you mentioned, and we’re doing another project with them now, and in Inuusirvik, the client, I think they were willing to they’re open minded, they’re willing to explore. They’re willing to take risks. So while the dynamics have evolved, I think that ability to continue to ask questions remains constant.

Miljački  24:50

What is the relationship between your self-initiated research and projects for which you have clients? Are there projects that you take on to enable other projects? Do you seek out grants for the work? I’m interested in the kind of financial mechanics of the practice, right? So is there a way that these things sort of connect, role, support one another?

White  25:13

Yeah, yeah, we’ve certainly been trying to link them more and more. There is still a kind of parallel paths. There are commissions that spin out of research projects. There’s been very few that have gone the other way, that have started a commission to become research projects. Usually it’s always, as Lola was saying earlier, maybe the bread and butter, foundational agenda of the practice is self-initiated work, and it’s kind of partly out of a exhaustion or disappointment, out of the competitive process, like maybe if you were, if I were to start again, the initial question of I would prefer not to, thinking about it again, we kind of would prefer not to do competitions anymore. We don’t think they’re very…

Miljački  25:59

Well I am going to ask you about them! Because the body of work on the website is, there’s a lot of competitions, right? And they, and so I wanted to ask you how you think about and engage them.

White  26:11

I mean, the competitions, sure, you fantasize, oh, Pick me, pick me! We might win. But I would say we were just looking for ways to not have idle hands. We were looking for something to do. And you look for little assignments but what’s, what was always fascinating about it, maybe this is like competition culture of the early 2000s, is that there was really interesting, there the competitions were so formative, and just cementing our ability to climb outside of the spherical center of the discipline, and be willing to be at the edges, or the kind of quasi edges, or intersectional edges with biology or with economics, or whatever it might be, and that was so exciting. And then do we practice that today? Maybe not quite as boldly. But I would say that in Inuusirvik or Michipicoten, were projects that did try to engage, like they both invite climate in, both of those projects, one invites the rain into a pavilion, which goes against the very idea of a pavilion. A pavilion is supposed to shield you from the rain. Instead, we have this rain portal that opens up. And in the Inuusirvik project in the Arctic, in Iqaluit, temperatures go below freezing, and you only get four hours of daylight in February and January. And this really sort of invites the sun or the snow onto the building, like we’re using snow in insulative properties. And so despite the scale shift or going from crazy competition ideas that don’t get built or unbuilt ideas to built works, there’s a thread hopefully that is continuing some of that experimentation

Miljački  27:59

I still want to hear about, if you can help us relate the shape of your practice to modes of engaging collaborators and audiences and a financial mechanics of how that works.

Sheppard  28:15

I would say we’re very lucky in Canada that as academics we are… this is the nitty gritty of the economics, but it actually is what allows us, or has allowed us, in many ways, to do a lot of what we’ve done, is that we have access to government grants that are, well, certainly not at the scale of engineers and scientists, but can fund you for two or three years of work. So they’re fairly elaborate grants. They’re a lot of work. You build out teams other social scientists, but there’s a particular strain of them called Research and Creation, which is, of course, beautiful for architects and artists and dancers and musicians, and they recognize that creation is a form of research and so that is very different than the Graham Foundation grants or the Canada Council grants, which are lovely but really don’t sustain you, or don’t sustain someone helping you for more than a few months. And so that ability, I think, to take your time, to waste time, quote, unquote, researching, going back to the exhibitions, and we’re working on a book, which hopefully one day we’ll see the light of day, is everything that ends up on the cutting room floor from the last five biennales, because in these exhibitions, we read and research and draw for three months, which you could never do without a grant. If you’re a kind of fee-based firm, you don’t have that luxury. And then, of course, you can’t show all of that to a public, they’re not engaged long enough. It’s not possible. So one of the points of a book we’re working on is to sort of bring forth all the research material that goes into these exhibitions, but, I think that has been really critical, and even in commissions now that have clients will sometimes in the early phases, dovetail… there’s a lot of overlap, because the work is in the North. It’s looking at questions of housing or transitional housing or health. We’re able to spend far more time doing research than a normal quote, unquote firm could do. So that is at least part of the mechanism, and has been very important. 

Miljački  30:51

Thank you. Maybe now we can tease out with a bit more precision what constitutes research and how you go about it in your office? What is the status of architectural proposals within that research, but also graphics and other sort of dimensions of it? How do we talk about the material of research; what you just started talking about? So thank you for setting me up.

White  31:21

Yeah, what is research, Lola? What is it!

Sheppard  31:25

Well, I think a lot about whether I actually believe in this term, design research. I believe in architectural history research, I believe in building science research. Even though that is what we do, I guess, or what we would describe that we do, design research, it is nebulous, because if one believes research can prove outcomes, I’m not actually convinced that when we do our design research, no matter how rigorous we seek to be, we can prove or validate in some certifiable way, the quote, unquote, outcomes. But I think, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, perhaps the role of research, at least as we undertake it, is even opening up questions, like opening up areas of research that haven’t been looked at as many researchers do, and I think also what is legitimately asked within the scope of architecture, right? I mean, one sees this in student thesis work, where one wants to ask this expansive question, and then one has to pose the question, why is this happening in a school of architecture? Or, in our case, why is a design firm looking at these questions? And so what is the role of architecture in intervening in these complex issues? Maybe even posing that question as part of the research?

White  32:58

I don’t have too much anxiety about what is research, because I think as long as you don’t already know the answer to the question you’re asking, that’s a form of research. If you already know the answer to the question you’re asking, it is not research, that is correct. But the broadness by which research can exist within the discipline, it’s so healthy that it is broad. Thank goodness. If there was a scientific method behind it, if there were, you know, agreed upon sort of police that would say, well, that is research, and that is not, I mean, I would say the form of research we’re most interested in is not internal questions to the disciplines, not questions about formal dexterity, not questions about material agency, but really more about back to publics, and maybe in what ways. I’d say the broadest thesis research question of the practice is really architectures, what kind of new architectures emerge when architecture is more entangled with its place, maybe you could say, like a meta project within that is, what does vernacular mean? Today, this is actually a little pet project of ours. We’re always asking about, what does vernacular, what is vernacular to that place? Now, vernacular sounds kind of fuddy duddy and kind of stodgy as a term, but it’s actually really interesting to think about, especially in some places where any form of vernacular has never been able to exist because it’s been overrun by a kind of another dominant force, whether it be a prefabricated thing or this is why, like, actually our very first quote research project, now you’re going deep history, was at Ohio State, where we were looking at flat, we called it Flat Space, right? Which was a kind of homage to the book called Flat Land, which is a entirely a beautiful, two dimensional narrative about a line and a point existing. It’s this kind of old, old novel. The book is very short, but Flat Space is basically about parking lots and about Home Depots and Walmarts. And it was 2003 and we were suddenly in Columbus, Ohio, and we’re like, oh my goodness, and we’d been out of the country for three or five years, and it had just really taken off. It was just, you know, ex-urban conditions everywhere. And the question there was really about, what can we do here? What kind of space is this? What kind of vernacular is this space? Is a parking lot vernacular? Or, maybe more interestingly, can a parking lot be vernacular? Or can one of these cookie cutter, repeatable light frame, megastructure buildings like a Walmart or whatever, or Lowe’s. Can these, is there a vernacular? And then, how are they expressing that vernacular? It’s facade-ism right? It’s a color, something like, maybe something Colorado-esque on the facade that says, This belongs in Denver, but yet it’s Walmart. But that was interesting culturally, that someone thought, let’s put this timber gable on the front to give it that, you know, woodsy Colorado feel, so vernacular is a pet research project that made us go to the Arctic and got us quite interested, also in First Nation complexities around First Nation housing.

Miljački  36:29

Well, how has that work and engagement with the Canadian northern territories made that set of questions specific? I’m trying to sort of see how, we started off with research generally, and I’m interested in how that becomes specific, and what are the things that come out of this, the engagement of the Canadian northern territories that you didn’t encounter elsewhere, right?

Sheppard  36:55

So I think part of it, and I’m glad Mason brought up Flat Space, because when he said two seminal projects, I was like, Wait, Flat Space! Which was our first self-generated research project. I think in both those environments, profoundly different as they are, we realized how completely unfamiliar they were. I mean, especially Flat Space emerged, because I am a very urban child, and I had actually never lived in the Midwest, in the US period, and certainly not the Midwest, and I arrived in this environment and actually couldn’t fathom it. And, similarly, in the North, we came completely as outsiders, knowing nothing. And I think one thing we’ve learned in both those research projects is the kind of humility required, but also looking really closely and carefully and looking not only at architecture, but as Mason mentioned earlier, sort of spatial practice. And I was actually thinking as Mason was talking about, even in flat space, or in that research, we were sitting there documenting tailgating parties and people playing with grocery carts, like these things that are invisible, but that are acts, or the fact that people would park in a Walmart parking lot, eat their lunch and drive away. So it became a de facto restaurant. And so looking at these sort of spatial practices done by the occupants of that space, I think that was even more necessary in the north where everything is actually sort of surreal in some ways, you know? I remember when we were doing early research learning about the Dempster highway, and there are communities that the price of milk quadruples twice a year when the connectivity in the Dempster highway breaks because the boat no longer works, but the ice hasn’t frozen over. And there are these things you learn, which you realize you sort of need to know, and you need to do the research to find them out, to understand the place. And I think that’s very different than when you work in your backyard, and you can assume, or you think you know what a school is, what a house is. And so I think the North kind of demanded a kind of deep research and a broad and all encompassing research to understand the multiple intersecting complexities that shape that environment, and that’s why the book isn’t only about architecture and urbanism, but it looks at resources. It looks at mobility, and it looks at monitoring both research and military, because in some ways those last three forces are more important than architecture and urbanism in many ways, Can we talk a little bit about your collaborations in the context of the Canadian Northern Territories, and maybe how that whole project is influencing you in thinking about mapping, infrastructure, spatial practices, architecture?

White  40:18

I guess it first began with the 2014 Venice Biennale project called Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15, which was a 15th anniversary of the establishment of Nunavut. And Nunavut is a territory that is as large as France plus Spain, plus Germany, plus Portugal plus Scandinavia. So we’re talking about a very large territory here, and this, Nunavut means our land in Inuktitut. And the exhibition was an engagement project. It was a collaboration project of picking five architects with some experience working in the North, working with five different organizations and five different schools of architecture. And so again, that kind of flattening of expertise and inviting people at different stages of their careers or lives. And each of the collab, there was one that was looking at what is the future of education, Arctic education, that was incorporating even like a daycare into the school, and looking at vocational arts, and actually hoping to train more architects. There are not enough Inuit or indigenous architects in Canada. There are not enough. And so sort of fostering that connection. There was a team that was also looking at a performing arts space, and a performing arts space, which, again down south or in a kind of Western context, performing arts space is a kind of black box theater or something. But this one was really about outdoor spaces and really kind of like performance that can happen in the round. And so recognizing different forms of performance and how it’s experienced and how the audience is part of that, which was very different. And so another kind of vernacular. But yeah, and all of those collaborations, it was roll up your sleeves: here’s some tracing paper, where we put people in the same room together. They would come out with dog-eared sketches and chicken scratch ideas and notes, and those got evolved through online and meetings and shared sketches until it arrived at a sort of fixed version that was ready for exhibition. But all those collaborations were formative, and one of them was the health organization that we eventually, 10 years later, opened up a new facility for them, and that was the premise of how we met them. And so it was, in some ways, not knowing at the time, but we were building out relationships and building out trust, which is a project in and of itself, as a practice, I think, especially when you’re out of context. And at one point, I think Lola mentioned to me she might say in the I Would Prefer Not To is I would prefer not to build in Toronto. And I was like, Lola, you’re going to actually say that? Don’t, because you never know! Maybe we actually will. But it is true, we have not built in this, the third largest city in North America that we call home, and we’ve called home for the last 20 years, we have not built anything here other than our own kitchen renovation in our own house, which we would never do a kitchen renovation for anyone, and so it is interesting to think that we’ve always been operating out of context. And there is something powerful about that out of context. Maybe I’ll let you pick up Lola, anything I’ve overlooked in that.

Sheppard  44:04

I think it’s particularly fraught as a settler architect, and I think there’s a lot of debate in Canada about whether it’s even appropriate. And I don’t know that I have an answer, but I think all one can do as a settler architect, working with these partners in environments and contexts that are not ours and it’s not our culture goes back to this idea of listening deeply, going with humility, asking questions, and I guess the only thing I hope that maybe we can bring as, and I would say this, of any project, is sometimes not being the outsider means you see things in a new light, or you’ll pick up on things. That perhaps, when it’s in your hometown, you sort of again, take for granted. But yeah, I think it is a complex question working in these environments, and how to do it respectfully.

Miljački  45:17

Well, can you tell us a little more about the Inuit community wellness hub and how it came about? What you had to do?

White  45:27

Yeah, it’s maybe a good seven, eight year project, off and on. First it was about it working with a non-profit organization that is centered around indigenous health, in this case, specifically Inuit health in Nunavut, which is, obviously there’s a lot of mental health issues, there’s sexual health issues. There’s disconnect between culture, right? The most fascinating, mind blowing kind of quote around this is, someone said that this is a culture that had to go from igloos to internet in one generation. In one generation, they went from living in igloos and being born in igloos. And I saw Paul Okalik, who was one of the, I guess, sort of founding fathers, if you will, of the Nunavut territorial land claims speak. And he often speaks like, I was born in an igloo. Anyway. And so, this is somebody who’s in their early 60s. So to think about that as a sort of premise is really challenging, and that’s the premise of this organization that we worked with in the kind of making a Wellness Center. And so the Wellness Center has a daycare, it has an elders Council consultation space for healing. It has a library that isn’t your conventional kind of library with mostly books, but it’s a space for stories. Space for storytelling. It has a community room. It has a community kitchen that has a very large door in it to bring large animals into. So you can bring a caribou or a seal into this kitchen and prepare it in a traditional way. And it has office spaces upstairs for the research center, and it has a green roof. It has a green roof that has tundra on it, not a green roof that you mow the lawn of, but it has Labrador Tea, and it has rocks and debris and drift wood, and it’s actually still kind of seeding. It’s going to take a few years for this to grow, and then the space that kind of binds the whole space is this kind of Rotunda that is what she calls a drum space. Has amazing acoustics in there. It’s a good space to kind of gather in the center of the building. Gets this amazing kind of light, and it had, it’s lined in this wood piece that is trying to make reference to many things, one of which is the tradition of snow goggles, which the Inuit invented, which is usually made out of caribou bone, which is a, literally, like a pair of goggles you put over eyes, but it’s a bone. It’s actually the, I believe it’s the…

Miljački  48:21

Like a shade? 

White  48:22

…Shin bone, yeah, but it has little cuts in the bone that allow you to squint to see, so that you can see in a bright, bright day across the tundra, when everything’s white, the sky is white and the ground is white, you can see. And then the other reference is to Qamutiik, which is an Inuktitut word for sled. And the sleds are often made out of two by fours and driftwood, but they’ve really kind of crafted in a way that you don’t need any screws. It’s all made out of rope and wood. And they used to put seal hairs or fur on the runners of the sled. So anyway, just like referencing some of these beautiful material cultural traditions in the building, and it was, I don’t know, she gave us a long leash to try things out like the green roof and integrating snow drift onto the roof to use it…

Miljački  49:20

She is a collaborator?

White  49:22

She would be a collaborator. Absolutely, she is Gwen Healey Akearok. And interestingly enough, we even talked a lot about intellectual property of the project. And something early on, she said is, we wanted to talk about how we have a stake in that intellectual property of this project. And we were like, Absolutely, you are a co-conspirator. And so, it was an entertaining conversation around, we’re also like, what is intellectual property in architecture anyway? But to basically say that she would have some control over where it could be seen, and be aware of it was important to her.

Sheppard  50:03

We’ve had, on this issue of collaborators, Gwen Healey, someone by the name of Shirley Tagalik in Arviat, who’s been helping with these kitchen table talks. We’re now working with Phil Montour at six nations, which is actually near the University of Waterloo, and we’ve encountered these amazing forces of nature in each of these communities that are doing so much and so invested. And it’s, on the one hand, inspiring, but it has been interesting to realize that change happens really through individuals. I think that is one conclusion I have walked away with. I mean, I think I believe this in relation to everything, academic change, global change, but these leaders in their community that are both advocating, politically, socially, for change, and then also are the ones most willing to take risks and think differently and ambitiously about the role of the built environment has been really pretty amazing.

Miljački  51:13

Congratulations on this building. Also, I don’t know how you see it, but I certainly see it a bit as a proof of concept, in a sense. So your office website lists eight people, including the two of you, for the last two years at least. Do you have any procedures in place by which you both expose your office to the realities of running the office, and do you invite your team to think collectively about the commissions, projects or maybe questions that you will and will not take?

White  51:58

Certainly, I mean true to the name Lateral Office, we try to be as flat functioning as possible. I would say more so now we’re able to, our egos are certainly much more in check, I hope, and able to invite others, maybe it was more challenging when you’re starting off or you’re trying to figure out a way to steer the project, steer the practice. But yeah, we had, Kearon Roy Taylor has been working with us for several years. We had Matthew Spremulli worked with us for several years. Suzie Harris-Brandts, who’s now teaching at MIT, worked with us for several years. We’ve had some incredible people working with us as collaborators internally, and we really, they’re more cooks in the kitchen, and these are people that were essentially functioning as associates in the practice, and we did increasingly use that title as we went forward in that capacity. But frankly, anyone touch, I mean, usually drawings and objects and designs and files sort of change hands. They go from one hand to another and back to the maybe the first hand that touched it. And usually there’s a kind of come and gather around this computer screen, or come and hover over this drawing or take a look at this model. And everyone’s invited. No one’s excluded from that. We have a very open format. We have six desks. Our office is made up of six desks and one breakfast table and a little coffee corner, and those six desks usually have four people on them, and that’s it. And it’s been really, I think, quite educational for us to always invite others, like, we don’t have a drawing style or a formal style, we don’t say, Well, here, take two days and quickly study exactly how we’ve worked and repeat that. I mean, we don’t think we do like, maybe others think we do. 

Miljački  54:08

Huh, yeah, I did make a face!

White  54:11

But, and I recognize naturally like, I’m thinking about, again, the equivalence in music or art. Someone says, Why, I change every time, I do. Like, do you though, really? because there’s some things you repeat. But I would say we don’t have a go to color palette, or we must remember, like, sometimes we’re collaging, sometimes it’s crisp line, sometimes it’s black and white, sometimes it’s color, sometimes it’s only three colors. So I feel like there’s a bit of play in that. And I think formally, there’s a little bit of, there isn’t a specific language we’re adhering to, but we maybe haven’t done enough buildings to also say that there’s language yet.

Sheppard  54:48

I’ll just add very quickly: I think despite you saying there have been eight people, we’re actually rarely more than three or four. Sometimes in the summer we expand a little bit. And I only underline that because, there’s something really nice about the intimacy of being small and it does mean that we’re, and it’s interesting, actually, in several projects recently, we’ve collaborated with other firms, some very large, some small and realizing that, actually that small, our smallness, makes us quite nimble. That we can move across things. And as Mason said, swap projects. And so I think that mode is kind of, I don’t think we could do what we do if we had a much bigger structure. And right now, we’re on a very steep learning curve, I’d say, over the last two or three years, as we are doing built projects, we’re learning about project administration and details, and I think we’re pretty transparent with our staff of, I actually don’t know how this works either, we’re going to figure this out together, which I, I’m not sure the staff, that our younger staff appreciate, but there is kind of no hierarchy in that. In that moment of just, we are both going to look this up and see if we can figure it out.

Miljački  56:18

So what kind of skill set is required, then, for the work that you do?

White  56:25

Patience, the skill of patience, the art of patience. I mean, hopefully the skill of being willing to speak up. Thinking about all the amazing people we’ve had the great fortune of working with under the umbrella of Lateral Office. We’re always inviting saying, What is your opinion? So I think the ability to speak up is so like, what do you think about this matter? 

Sheppard  56:55

Also curiosity. I think all the people Mason mentioned had brought their own sort of very profound and kind of personal sets of interest, whether it was interest in technology, whether it was interest in politics, whether it was interest in culture and I think one can see there, we can, I mean, I don’t know if outsiders can, but one can see their influence in the projects, which is, and it’s been really rewarding.

Miljački  57:31

This is my last question. Can we talk about the conditions in which you do your best work, or would prefer to do your work?

White  57:42

Time is kind of important. The rush doesn’t yield anything good, so allowing for time and rethink and as much contact time as possible with those publics that might use it, the organization or group of people that might use it, as much contact time. We’re doing a project right now that is a essentially a homeless shelter, but it’s actually a housing continuum project, because it has an emergency shelter, it has temporary beds and it has transitional housing, but it also has clinic spaces and counseling spaces, and this is in Labrador in a town called Happy Valley Goose Bay. And Happy Valley Goose Bay is another small community with a complex issue and it we’ve done, we just finished a gender-lens engagement with them that was really fascinating, thinking about anything from washrooms to partitioning bed areas and just being, really having the time to do that. It’s making the project better. It’s going to make it more relevant longer in time. It’s going to make it improve the housing and homelessness situation in the community. So I think having, we’re doing our best work, I think when we have the a proper amount of time and a good sustained degree of engagement with different aspects of a project’s complexity in order for it to succeed for 50, 60 years, one hopes.

Sheppard  59:41

Yeah. I would add, I think having partners that are willing to also open up the questions, or be open to unpredictability, I was also thinking about this project Mason was talking about, and we had a lot of time, partly inadvertently, because it took a while to get started, because there were actually many phases of engagement. And it’s funny to watch our Miro board. In fact, it got so saturated, we had to start a second one, where we’re iterating, and everything was up for definition, which I think was daunting, but interesting. What the program was even kept evolving, and then the form it should take and it was interesting. We’re working in a fairly conservative part of Canada that has, like most of the North, sees architecture as a kind of expedient answer. You know, how quickly, how cheaply, how simply can you build? And it’s been interesting to watch a government agency that I never actually thought would even select us with this other firm that’s also very small, take a risk on two small, unknown firms, and then, actually, I think the time also allowed us to, sort of, I don’t want to say, convince them, but consider solutions that are not, perhaps, what they were expecting. And I think our opening up sort of possibilities about what we think about institutional buildings in that context, in interest, I hope interesting ways.

Miljački  1:01:33

Great. Thank you. Do you want to add something? To put something on the record?

Sheppard  1:01:38

I think we covered it all. I’m sure I’ll think of something later, but that was pretty good.

Miljački  1:01:46

Then, Lola and Mason, thank you for talking to me today, and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To.