Lateral Architecture

Established 2002; based in Toronto, Canada
Lola Sheppard and Mason White, founders and principals

Lateral Architecture’s practice is centered on the belief that architecture is an exercise in lateral thinking, and design an empirical process operating across seemingly disparate disciplines and phenomena. The firm’s design work and research presuppose that architecture and public space are defined less through form than through what it calls “formatting.” Formatting establishes an organization for program, interactivity, and change to occur, and it is from this ordering that a project emerges. Working at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism, Lateral is particularly interested in marginal urban and postindustrial sites where the systems and codes that determine these environments must be uncovered and rethought. Generally eschewing the heroic gesture, Lateral instead recalibrates existing programmatic, environmental, or physical elements through strategies of inversion, amplification, hybridity, and transfer. Fundamentally, Lateral Architecture’s work is about questioning and conflating hierarchies, whether at the scale of American exurbs, as in Flatspace, or a single-family home. In its competition-winning inside/out house (Pilkington Glasshouse Competition, 2002), transparent storage walls around the perimeter of the house display the owner’s possessions to the world, upending the hierarchy established by the house’s iconic predecessors and, in Lateral’s parlance, reformatting its program. Lateral was awarded the Howard E. LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellowship by Ohio State University in 2003; received the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Award in 2005; and was unanimously chosen the winner of the Orphan Spaces charrette competition in Toronto in 2006.