THE ACTIVE LAYER
Lateral Office - Mason White & Lola Sheppard with Fionn Byrne (MLA 2010) / Nikole Bouchard / Kyle Yang (MLA 2010) / Matthew Spremulli (MArch 4) / Fei-Ling Tseng (MScP 2010)

Extension Gallery for Architecture, located at Archeworks, 625 N. Kingsbury St., Chicago, will present The Active Layer — an installation by Mason White (Daniels) and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office.

The installation opens on Friday October 15 and runs through December 3. Prior to the opening at 6pm, Mason White will lecture on recent work from Lateral Office.

Extension Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free.

The Active Layer is an homage to the complex glaciated landscape of the Arctic. The regional geology and climatic conditions give rise to a vast diversity of unique aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems found within the permafrost layer, glaciated rock, and the millions of melt water pools that form in sunken pockets of land. The Active Layer invites visitors to experience this condition, to be immersed in it, and observe its complex patterns and terrain. Over 25,000 unique points fill the gallery in a tight array marking different topographic heights and bathymetric depths. The work can be read as both a scaled immersive Arctic landscape and a hypnotic spatial moray of points and lines.

Lateral Office, founded in 2003, is an award-winning experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio is committed to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment. Lateral Office seeks direct engagement with challenging questions related to the public realm and productive infrastructures. This is demonstrated through successful cross-disciplinary collaborations, award-wining projects at various scales, and recognition in publications and exhibitions world-wide. Recently the firm was awarded the 2010 Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts.

www.extensiongallery.us