Lola Sheppard

Lola Sheppard is a researcher and practicing Architect. Much of her own research and professional work is situated in rural and remote communities, working through new models of community engagement, with Inuit and First Nations partners, with a particular focus on the Canadian North.  Her design research work explores how architecture can operate within and engage with an expanded field of politics, economics, and environment, while serving as a tool of cultural empowerment. Her work examines how architecture how mapping, drawing and other forms of visualization can spatialize the entanglement of architecture with complex, often invisible forces. Embracing thinkers such as Anna Tsing and Bruno Latour’s ideas on non-linear scalar thinking, Lola is committed to architecture’s ability to work across scales, engaging with the complexity of the territorial or regional scale, down to the hyper local, reflecting spatial practices and material culture.

When working with students, she is particularly interested in the role of architecture in regions of instability—whether political, environmental or economic. Examining conditions of extremes takes one away from a centre point, characterized by predictability, balance and familiarity. Instead, one is forced to move towards a condition where unpredictability, disequilibrium and strangeness become the new normal. What is the role of architecture or infrastructure in such contexts? Does it redress or mitigate? To capitalize on new opportunities? Rather than conceiving of architecture as necessarily “problem-solving,” she is motivated to ask how design—at urban, building and landscape scales—can serve as a provocation to rethink current spatial models. Can design serve as a catalyst for small-scale, incremental change? How can we see and document the unique particularities of a place anew and leverage opportunities for new spatial typologies which respond to the urgencies of the 21st century?

View Professor / Associate Director, Graduate Studies Lola Sheppard's faculty profile.