Bracket 3: At Extremes

Bracket [at Extremes] includes critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive? Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?

Lola Sheppard received her Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture from McGill University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. she has taught at the University of Toronto, Ohio State University, and California College of the Arts. She previously worked in the offices of Jean Nouvel (Paris), Peter Rose (Cambridge), and Allies and Morrison (London) before forming LATERAL OFFICE. She is committed to architecture's new relationship to social and ecological possibilities - not just solutions. Sheppard is the recipient of the 2012 RAIC Young Architect Award.