Overview

""There are many norths in this North."" Louis-Edmond Hamelin, 1975 Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory charts the unique spatial realities of Canada's Arctic region, an immense territory populated with small, dispersed communities. The region has undergone dramatic transformations in the name of sovereignty, aboriginal affairs management, resources, and trade, among others. For most of the Arctic's modern history, architecture, infrastructure, and settlements have been the tools of colonialism. Today, tradition and modernity are intertwined. Northerners have demonstrated remarkable adaptation and resilience as powerful climatic, social, and economic pressures collide. This unprecedented book documents-through the themes of urbanism, architecture, mobility, monitoring, and resources-the multiplicity of norths that appear and the spatial practices employed to negotiate it. Using innovative drawings, maps, timelines, as well as essays and interviews, Many Norths reveals a distinct northern vernacular.

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9781940291314

Table of Contents

Reviews

[Many Norths] is something of a magnum opus for the office, compiling many years' worth of research--architectural, infrastructural, geopolitical--including original interviews, maps, diagrams, and historical analyses of the Canadian North. Or the Canadian Norths, as Sheppard and White make clear. The book is cleanly designed, but its strength is not in its visual impact; it's in how it combines rigorous primary research with architectural documentation. The interviews are a particular highlight. While the focus of Many Norths is, of course, specifically Canadian, its topics are relevant not only to other Arctic nations but to other extreme environments and remote territories. --Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG

The book is cleanly designed, but its strength is not in its visual impact; it's in how it combines rigorous primary research with architectural documentation. The interviews are a particular highlight. Among more than a dozen other subjects, there are discussions with anthropologist Claudio Aporto on wayfinding techniques and spatial perception among the Inuit, with master mariner Thomas Paterson on the logistics of Arctic shipping, with historian Shelagh Grant on sovereignty and security in the far north, and with Baffin Island native whale hunter Charlie Qumuatuq on seasonal food webs. While the focus of Many Norths is, of course, specifically Canadian, its topics are relevant not only to other Arctic nations but to other extreme environments and remote territories. --Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG

Author Information

Lola Sheppard received her Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture from McGill University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. she has taught at the University of Toronto, Ohio State University, and California College of the Arts. She previously worked in the offices of Jean Nouvel (Paris), Peter Rose (Cambridge), and Allies and Morrison (London) before forming LATERAL OFFICE. She is committed to architecture's new relationship to social and ecological possibilities - not just solutions. Sheppard is the recipient of the 2012 RAIC Young Architect Award. Mason White is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Ontario. White is founding partner of Lateral Office, a Toronto-based experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In addition to his practice, White is associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is recipient of the Emerging Voices and Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York; the Wheelwright Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; the Friedman Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Lefevre Fellowship at The Ohio State University. White is co-editor of Bracket, vol. 1 and co-editor of Pamphlet Architecture, no. 30: Coupling--Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

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