Azra Akšamija PhD '11, Associate Professor at MIT Architecture, and Marie Law Adams M.Arch '06, Founder of Landing Studio, were named to the Architectural League of New York’s 2022 Emerging Voices.
From the Architectural League Website:
The Architectural League of New York has revealed the 2022 class of Emerging Voices.
Held annually since 1982, Emerging Voices is an invited, juried portfolio competition spotlighting eight nascent practices and individuals based in the United States, Mexico, and Canada that possess “distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urbanism,” per The Architectural League. To date, the prestigious award has been bestowed to over 300 design practitioners and educators who have made singular contributions to the built environment while addressing larger social themes of the day. Past winners include Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi (1983), Toshiko Mori (1992), James Corner (2001), Eric Höweler & Meejin Yoon (2007), Tatiana Bilbao (2010), Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg (2013), Chris Leong and Dominic Leong (2017), Fernanda Canales (2018), and Olalekan Jeyifous (2020).
Representing cities spanning from Chicago to Charlotte to Cambridge and beyond, this year’s Emerging Voices were selected as part of a two-stage review process from a pool of 50 entrants by an eight-person jury composed of design professionals based across North America including, as is tradition, several previous winners. Joining Architectural League president Paul Lewis on this year’s jury were Ersela Kripa, El Paso, Texas; Zach Mortice, Chicago; Marc Neveu, Tempe, Arizona; Rashida Ng, Philadelphia; Chelina Odbert, Los Angeles; Susan Scott, Vancouver, British Columbia; Saidee Springall, Mexico City, and Sara Zewde, New York City.
“I would say that I am very happy with the winning firms,” Kripa relayed to AN. (Kripa is a 2018 Emerging Voices awardee alongside Stephen Mueller, her co-founding partner at AGENCY Architecture.)
“They expand the bounds of architectural practice towards inclusive and truly accessible work within communities,” Kripa added. “They all share a sense of ethical duty, which should guide the discipline in every form.”
“This was a particularly strong collection of Emerging Voice submissions, and it was also one of the more heterogenous,” elaborated Lewis. “In our initial review of the applications, the jury was struck by the breadth of the different types of work. But, rather than indicating a fracturing of our discipline, this year’s winners were united in how they each clarified new types of agency, and new notions of value motivated by an optimism about what an architect could and should do.”
“Representing practices from across North America with projects often not in conventional cultural centers but in peripheral urban sites, each selected practice proposed intriguing models for using design to intensify social structures or make legible under-considered spatial practice,” he added.
In the coming days, AN will publish a series of standalone profiles of each of this year’s eight newly-minted Emerging Voices. And kicking off on March 10 is The Architectural League’s complementary Emerging Voices lecture series. Held virtually via Zoom on Thursday evenings, the free and open-to-the-public series concludes on March 31.
Until then, AN is pleased to present the 2022 Emerging Voices awardees complete with brief descriptions of their work as provided by The Architectural League: