Bracket is a book series that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. Bracket is an annual publication developed by InfraNet Lab and published by Actar. Seeking new voices and design talent, Bracket is structured around an open call for entries. Conceived as an almanac, the series looks at emerging thematics in our global age that are shaping the built environment in radically significant, yet often unexpected ways. Bracket [at extremes] examines architecture, infrastructure, and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points, and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at extremes] collects innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies and operations) and extreme contexts (cultural and climatic). Bracket asks: what is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?

Mason White is a founding partner of Lateral Office, and a director of InfraNet Lab. His recent research and design work explores the design engineering of the built environment, through the agency of spatial infrastructures and invisible networks. White is assistant professor at the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto. His design work and research has received numerous awards and international recognition in publications and exhibitions. Most recently, Lateral Office received the Gold Award from the Holcim Foundation in 2011, an Emerging Voices Award in 2011, and the Professional Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2010. White previously taught at Cornell University and Ohio State University, and has lectured extensively in Canada and the United States.

Maya Przybylski is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto (MArch, 2007) where she was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute Medal for her thesis work. Przybylski previously earned a degree with a specialization in software engineering from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto (BS, with honors, 2003). Through her own practice, she has collaborated with a range of design practitioners including RVTR, Lateral Office, WilliamsonWilliamson, and Bruce Mau Design. She is coeditor of Bracket 1: On Farming.

Lola Sheppard is a partner at Lateral Office, a firm dedicated to the productive overlap of architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and urbanism. Lateral was awarded the Canadian Prix de Rome and the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York in 2010. She is also a codirector of InfraNet Lab, a research laboratory dedicated to probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. She is editor of Twenty + Change, a biennale exhibition and catalog of emerging designers in Canada. In 2012, she was awarded the Royal Institute of Canadian Architect's Young Architect Award, as its first female recipient. Sheppard is associate professor at University of Waterloo's School of Architecture. She is coeditor of Bracket 2: Goes Soft.

Jury and Editorial Advisors for Bracket 3:

Keller Easterling is an architect and writer from New York and a professor at Yale University. Her book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Her previous book Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure and Political Arts, examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.

Michael U. Hensel is an architect, researcher, educator, and writer. He is professor of architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, where he directs the Research Center for Architecture and Tectonics. He is a founding member of OCEAN (1994) and he acted as founding chairman of OCEAN’s Design Research Association (2008). Previously he taught at the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture in London. He has held visiting professorships and innovation fellowships and taught and lectured in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. His research interests and efforts include formulating a theoretical and methodological framework for performance-oriented architecture and developing a biological paradigm for design and sustainability of the built environment.

Alessandra Ponte is professor at the École d'architecture, Université de Montréal. She has taught history and theory of architecture and landscape at Pratt Institute, Princeton University, Cornell University, Instituto Universitario di Architettura, and ETH. She has written articles and essays in numerous international publications, published a volume on Richard Payne Knight and the eighteenth- century picturesque and coedited, with Antoine Picon, a collection of papers on architecture and the sciences (New York, 2003). She organized the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965–1975 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2009) and recently collaborated on the exhibition and coedited the catalog for God &Co: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (London: Architectural Association, 2011). She is currently completing a series of investigations on North American landscapes for her forthcoming book Maps and Territories (2012).

François Roche is the principal of R&Sie(n), based on Paris and founded in 1989 by François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux. Their architectural work seeks to articulate the real and/or fictional—geographic situations and narrative structures that can transform them. His work through R&Sie(n) is organized on three sets of themes : research as speculation, fiction as practice, and practice as lifespan (H&N). He is also a guest research professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP, as well as president of the Laboratory of Research/ New-Territories in Paris.

Hashim Sarkis is the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies and director of the Aga Khan Program at the GSD. Sarkis is also a practicing architect. Hashim Sarkis Studios are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Beirut, Lebanon. Sarkis is author of several books and articles including Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis (Beirut: Dar Annahar, 2003); editor of CASE: Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital (Munich: Prestel, 2001); coeditor, with Peter G. Rowe, of Projecting Beirut (Munich: Prestel, 1998), and, with Eric Mumford, of Josep Lluis Sert: The Architect of Urban Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). He received his BArch and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, his MArch from the GSD, and his PhD in architecture from Harvard University.

Born in Belgium, Julien De Smedt is currently one of Denmark's most successful young architects. He worked for several years for OMA/ Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam before cofounding, together with Bjarke Ingels, the Copenhagen-based architecture firm PLOT, which quickly established itself on the Danish architecture scene. De Smedt has won numerous architecture awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and the European Prize for Urban Public Space. He was also nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award and has won the Young Architect of the Year Award twice. He has been director of the Copenhagen-based JDS Architects since 2006.

New Zealand-born architect and author Mark Wigley is Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He is one of the foremost architectural theorists and critics of his generation, and has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture. In 2005, Wigley cofounded Volume magazine, together with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman. As a guest curator, he has produced widely attended exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Witte de With, Rotterdam.

Launched in 2007, InfraNet Lab (INL) is a research collaborative that curates exhibitions, organizes design competitions, and conducts online and print publications. The collaborative has a shared directorship between four primary members with a geographic basis in both Canada and the United States. INL posits the argument that a body of unique built works continues to arise out of the complex negotiation of, and competition for, biotic and abiotic resources. Operating in a manner similar to infrastructures, these works have evolved to merge landscape, urbanism, and architecture into a sophisticated mutant assemblage of surfaces, containers, and conduits. INL is focused on experimental architectures and writing, and privileges emerging and undiscovered talent.