Time and Place
Time: 12:30pm (Central)
Location: Architecture and Urban Planning Room 170 – UWM Campus – 2131 E Hartford Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53211
“Drifts, Piles and Tundra: Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub, Iqaluit” presentation by Lola Sheppard, Founding Partner – Lateral Office and Professor at University of Waterloo- School of Architecture
Lecture Summary:
The Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub (ICWH) is an inter-generational nonprofit wellness, research, education, and community hub located in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and developed over the course of four years of engagement. It is intended for young children, researchers, community advocates, and elders and brings together land-based programs, Inuit counseling services, and childcare services, as well as a wellness research center, a community library, and much-needed community gathering spaces. The project developed through discussions with the client, researchers, and daycare staff about form, use, seasonality, and cultural expression. The project explores the potential for new Arctic vernaculars in form and material, that learn from the ways local buildings engage the ground through piles, deal with snow drifts and wind, and create new relationships with the tundra landscape.
BIO:
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 architecture practice.
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. For the past fifteen years, they have been pursuing research and design work on the role of architecture as a tool of cultural empowerment in rural and remote regions, working closely with First Nation and Inuit partners.
Lateral Office has presented their work at the Venice Biennale (2021), Oslo Triennale (2019), Seoul Biennale (2017), the Chicago Biennale (2015) and they were awarded a Special Mention at the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Lola Sheppard is co-author, with Mason 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 and White are also co-editors of the journal Bracket.
All lectures are free and open to planners, students, staff, faculty, and friends of the University. Please contact Karl Wallick, Department of Architecture
