Design Week Lecture

Jan 21, 2009

Mason White, University of Toronto, Lateral Architecture, InfraNet Lab
"Networked Ecologies: Infra-Architecture"
Wednesday 4:00-4:55 PM
Cook Douglass Lecture Hall 110

Mason White has a B.Arch from Virginia Tech and an M.Arch from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Mason’s work and research privileges architecture as a mutable territory that is formed out of and responsive to its environment and history. His work, research and teaching invites readings of Architecture as a byproduct of complex networks within ecology and culture. Design is conceived more as a system for open patterns of use and active engagement rather than merely arranged objects. Recent research pursues questions of the role of infrastructure and networks within contemporary spatial practice. His design research exists at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. It is often situated within sites where the systems and codes that determine these environments must be uncovered and rethought.

Mason founded Lateral Office <http://www.lateralarch.com> in 2002 in partnership with Lola Sheppard. He is also Director of InfraNet Lab <http://www.infranetlab.org> , an exploratory initiative launched in 2008. InfraNet Lab is a non-profit research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics.

Mason received the Alumni Travel Fellowship from Virginia Tech in 2001, and was the Lefevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at Ohio State University in 2003-04. In 2005, Lateral Office was selected for the Young Architects Forum by the Architectural League of New York.

Mason’s work has been published in Young Architects: Situating (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), Canadian Architect, Landscape Architecture, C3 and l’Arca. His writing has been published in Alphabet City: Fuel (MIT Press, 2008), Ourtopias (Riverside Press, 2008), MARK, Detail, A+U, and 306090. Mason has taught at Cornell University, The Ohio State University, and is currently the Director of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design.