The Canada Council for the Arts announced on July 13, 2010 that Toronto architecture firm Lateral Office is the winner of the $50,000 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture for 2010. This award recognizes excellent achievement in Canadian architectural practice.

Lateral Office’s founding partners, Lola Sheppard and Professor Mason White, will use the prize funds to travel to the Arctic to pursue their research proposal entitled Emergent North. The travel research continues an ongoing investigation and documentation of cold-climate settlement forms, issues, and vernacular innovations in the Circumpolar region. Emergent North looks at the challenges and opportunities of the public realm, civic space, landscape, and infrastructure emerging from a unique geography. Sheppard and White will conduct two travel routes through Nunavut, Yukon, and Northwest Territories, as well as Alaska and Greenland, to gather first-hand knowledge and documentation of Far Northern settlements. This research will inform a series of ongoing design projects responding to social, political, economic and ecological issues confronting the far north.

Images of their work can be downloaded from the Canada Council image gallery.

Click here to read the Canada Council's complete news release