Lola Sheppard is a Partner at Lateral Office, based in Toronto, Canada. Lateral Office won a Holcim Foundation Awards 2020 Silver for Indigenous Wellness in Canada - Community engaged healthcare and cultural center. Architects Lola Sheppard and Mason White collaborated with the Arctic Indigenous Wellness Foundation (AIWF) to envision a centre that will cater to the needs of 22,000 people from seven indigenous groups living in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The project was praised by the jury for its “genuine community engagement that conceives an architecturally compelling building that is relevant to the community.”

Lateral Office also won a Holcim Foundation Awards 2011 Gold for a socio-architectural project to create an Arctic Food Network (AFN) in Canada’s high arctic territory of Nunavut is a model to overcome the dependence of the Inuit community on expensive processed food products imported from the south. The jury praised the project for bringing an overlooked issue to the table and providing a stunning solution with an impressive value-added return on the resources invested.

Lola Sheppard is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, ON, Canada, and is also a Director of InfraNet Lab, a non-profit research collective, founded in 2008, which probes the spatial by-products of contemporary resource logistics.

Lola Sheppard is committed to architecture’s new relationship to social and ecological possibilities – not just solutions. Her research exists at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. It privileges architecture as a mutable territory that is formed out of and responsive to its history and environment. Much of her recent work and teaching has focused on the role of architecture, infrastructure, and the public realm in the unique and challenging context of Arctic Canada.

She received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture from McGill University in Montreal, and a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Lola Sheppard founded Lateral Office in 2003 in partnership with Mason White. Lateral Office was awarded the Emerging Voices from the Architecture League of New York (2011) and the Professional Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts (2010). The exhibition Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15, curated and managed by Lateral Office, was selected the Canada Council for the Arts and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada as the country’s contribution to the 2014 Venice Biennale in Architecture. The exhibition spans five themes that constitute Arctic Adaptations at the Venice Biennale - northern health, recreation, housing, education, and arts.

Lola Sheppard has taught at the University of Toronto, Canada; Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA; and California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA, USA. She previously worked in the offices of Jean Nouvel in Paris; Peter Rose in Cambridge, MA, USA; and Allies and Morrison, London.

She was recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) Young Architect Award in 2012. Lola Sheppard is co-editor of the journal Bracket: Architecture, Environment, Digital Culture.