Lola Sheppard and Mason White, founders of Toronto's Lateral Office, have won the Prix de Rome.Lola Sheppard and Mason White, founders of Toronto's Lateral Office, have won the Prix de Rome.

A Toronto architectural office that studies issues faced by cold climate communities has won the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture.

The $50,000 prize is awarded annually by the Canada Council for the Arts to a young architect or architecture firm that has completed its first buildings and shown exceptional potential.

Lola Sheppard and Mason White, founders of Toronto's Lateral Office, plan to use the money to do research on communities in Nunavut, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Alaska and Greenland.

"We are interested in whether there could be one design that embraces the environment of the North, from its snowfall and wind to freeze and thaw and dark and light," White said in an interview with CBC News.

White and Sheppard are fascinated with Ice Road Truckers, the History Channel series that follows drivers on the ice roads that serve the North.

White said he wants to see how infrastructure, including transportation, can be adapted to the unique geography of the North. He said they are especially interested in designing ways to operate in the shoulder seasons — spring and fall — when the ice roads melt or are treacherous.

The partners plan to travel to smaller remote settlements, of fewer than 6,000 people, to study issues they might have providing public services, including water, sewers and data infrastructure.

They also will look at the future of mining in the North, especially finding ways to make mining more environmentally sustainable.

"How could you make a mine to allow for its afterlife?" White said. "What kinds of communities could you build around it?"

Lateral Office is an experimental design-research studio founded in 2003.

Sheppard has worked in Rotterdam, Paris, Boston and London and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo school of architecture in Ontario.

White is a native of Washington, D.C., and assistant professor of the University of Toronto's school of architecture.