Many Norths: Spacial Practice in a Polar Territory

Description

Many North charts unique, often surreal spatial realities of Canada's arctic regions, documenting the geospatial, infrastructural, techno-cultural, and architectural innovations that have enabled modern life in this territory of climatic and cultural extremes. It is a region where the reality of daily life is often stranger and more extraordinary than any fiction one could envision. This unprecedented book documents the region through five themes: settlements, architecture, mobility, monitoring, and resources. Many North reveals the challenges and opportunities of building, mobility, and culture in the dispersed communities of the Canadian North, and speculates the emergence of a contemporary northern, or arctic, vernacular. Many North offers a unique look at Canada's "many norths," uncovering the compelling story of northern inhabitation and cultural adaptation through architecture, landscape, and infrastructure development over the past 100 years.

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. Mason White is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Ontario. White is founding partner of Lateral Office, a Toronto-based experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In addition to his practice, White is associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is recipient of the Emerging Voices and Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York; the Wheelwright Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; the Friedman Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Lefevre Fellowship at The Ohio State University. White is co-editor of Bracket, vol. 1 and co-editor of Pamphlet Architecture, no. 30: Coupling--Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

"[Many Norths] is something of a magnum opus for the office, compiling many years' worth of research--architectural, infrastructural, geopolitical--including original interviews, maps, diagrams, and historical analyses of the Canadian North. Or the Canadian Norths, as Sheppard and White make clear. The book is cleanly designed, but its strength is not in its visual impact; it's in how it combines rigorous primary research with architectural documentation. The interviews are a particular highlight. While the focus of Many Norths is, of course, specifically Canadian, its topics are relevant not only to other Arctic nations but to other extreme environments and remote territories." --Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG