Mason White
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.
He founded Lateral Office in 2002 in partnership with Lola Sheppard. Prior to this, he worked in design firms in New York, Boston, and London (UK). Mason is also a founding Director of InfraNet Lab, an exploratory initiative launched in 2008. InfraNet Lab is a non-profit research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. InfraNet Lab is an editor of the journal Bracket: Architecture, Environment, Digital Culture (www.brkt.org) and the co-curator of HYDROCity: Hydrology and Urbanism.
Lateral Office was awarded the 2010 Professional Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2005, the practice was selected for the Young Architects Forum from the Architectural League of New York. He is the 2008-09 Arthur W Wheelwright Fellow from Harvard Graduate School of Design for design research on Arctic occupation. In addition, he was the Lefevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at Ohio State University in 2003-04, and received the Alumni Travel Fellowship from Virginia Tech in 2001.
Lateral Office has won or been shortlisted for competitions internationally, including WPA 2.0 (2009), Vatnsmyri Masterplan, Reykjavik (2007), Orphan Spaces (2006), Metis Garden (2005), Memphis Riverfront (2003), Future Glasshouse (2002).
Mason is co-editor of the first issue of Bracket titled [on farming], published by Actar (2010), and a co-author of Pamphlet Architecture #30 titled COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2010).
His 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. In addition, Mason is Senior Editor at Archinect, with whom he received a 2008 Graham Foundation Grant. He has lectured and exhibited work internationally including Canada, US, Germany, Iceland, and England. Mason previously taught at Cornell (2004-05) and Ohio State University (2003-04), and has been an invited critic at the Architectural Association, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and Columbia, among others.