Iceland View. The scheme features a series of active public runways that highlight urban production, civic realm, and recreation.

Lateral Office was founded in 2003 by Lola Sheppard and Mason White in London. The practice is currently based in Toronto and is focused on architecture as an exercise in lateral thinking and design as an empirical process operating across seemingly disparate disciplines and phenomena.

Yesterday they were announced as winners of the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture and we thought we'd take a closer look at their projects. The kind of research they're working on fits perfectly with their definition of Architecture as Interactive Field:

Lateral Architecture’s work exists at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. It is often situated within marginal urban and post-industrial sites, where the systems and codes that determine these environments must be uncovered and rethought. Through their size and complexity, landscape, public space and infrastructure exist more as system for open patterns of use and tactile engagement, rather than merely arranged objects.

They are now working on the project Emergent North and will use the prize funds to travel to the Arctic to pursue their research proposal and will conduct two travel routes through Nunavut, Yukon, and Northwest Territories, as well as Alaska and Greenland, to gather first-hand knowledge and documentation of Far Northern settlements.

Diavik Diamond Mine in the North Slave Region at the Northwest Territories

The travel research continues an ongoing investigation and documentation of cold-climate settlement forms, issues, and vernacular innovations in the Circumpolar region. Emergent North looks at the challenges and opportunities of the public realm, civic space, landscape, and infrastructure emerging from a unique geography. This research will inform a series of ongoing design projects responding to social, political, economic and ecological issues confronting the far north.

We can read about the kind of geographies at the researched territory, using Nunavut as an example:

Nunavut comprises a major portion of Northern Canada, and most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, making it the fifth-largest country subdivision in the world. Nunavut covers 746,048 sq mi of land and 62,137 sq mi of water in Northern Canada. The territory includes part of the mainland, most of the Arctic Archipelago, and all of the islands in Hudson Bay, James Bay, and Ungava Bay (including the Belcher Islands) which belonged to the Northwest Territories. This makes it the fifth largest subnational entity (or administrative division) in the world.

In this context, the project aims to develop further research on the site:

Emergent North. Series of proposals centered on an ecologic and social empowerment of Canada’s unique Far North and its attendant networks.

Their research travels include road trips to the Ice Road Truck Stops, through the Contwoyto Winter Roads, first constructed in 1982 to address access to mining sites north of Yellowknife, almost 600Km long with 87% of its surface built on entirely frozen lakes. Only open 67 days on average during the winter, the ice road is constructed using techniques of snow clearance and flooding to produce a secure ice base. Lateral Office also proposes the Caribou Pivot Stations, under the premise that the project capitalizes on the intersection between the anticipated $85 million allocated to the Artic Research Infrastructure fund across Nunavut and Northwest Territories, and the threatened population of caribou, and integral species of the artic food web. A significant increase in ice layers made it difficult for caribou to forage for artic moss and lichen, their primary food and to combat this, they are proposing a new research station typology, in which the station creates a micro-climate or oasis of deflected and cleared snow and ice, a fresh forage field.

Emergent North. Ice Road Truck Stops

Emergent North. Caribou Pivot Stations

Emergent North. Liquid Commons
 

Other projects include speculative and interesting proposals such as Salton Sea, in Southwestern California, a project that converts a saline agricultural sump into a productive landscape and recreation and integrates a series of fabricated pools that harvest water and salt, encourage recreation, and foster micro-habitats.

Salton Sea aerial

Salton Sea WaterFarm

For more information, you can visit their website [not really updated!] and more recent projects, academic researches and lectures at the blog InfraNet Lab. We're also waiting for the publication of the first edition of [bracket] a collaboration between Archinect and InfraNet Lab. In the meantime, you can also follow Mason White on twitter at @masoncwhite.