Mason White
Mason White has a B.Arch from Virginia Tech and an M.Arch from Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Prof. White’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 2003 in partnership with Lola Sheppard. Prior to this, he worked in firms in New York, Boston, and London (UK). Prof. White 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 has received numerous awards and recognition, including: the 2011 Gold Award, North America from the Holcim Foundation; the 2011 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York; the 2010 Professional Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts; and the 2005 Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York. Lateral Office is the recipient of three separate Faculty Design Awards from the ACSA. Prof. White 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: Klaksvik City Centre (2012), Drylands Design (2012), Cleveland Design Competition (2011), WPA 2.0 (2009), Vatnsmyri Masterplan, Reykjavik (2007), Orphan Spaces (2006), Metis Garden (2005), Memphis Riverfront (2003), Future Glasshouse (2002).
Prof. White 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. He has lectured and exhibited work internationally including Canada, US, Germany, Iceland, and England. Prof. White 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.