10 Emerging Voices Winners on the Program's Lasting Influence

Steven Holl, Eric Owen Moss, Toshiko Mori, and more explain the personal importance of the award and its impact on their careers.

Metropolis editors

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In 2014, Toronto-based Williamson Chong was selected as an Emerging Voices winner, eight years after having won the League’s Young Architects Forum Competition. Pictured: The firm’s Frog's Hollow (2009) in Ontario.

Courtesy Bob Gundu

For more than 30 years, the Architectural League's Emerging Voices awards have played an integral role in the profession through its discovery and cultivation of young talent. Hundreds of North American architects have been anointed by the League, whose directors work very hard in molding the program to contemporaneous movements, events, and concerns. Their track record is beyond dispute, with winners including Thom Mayne, Stan Allen, Tod Williams, Winka Dubbeldam, and Amale Andraos. "It's knowing how to identify a firm at the right moment, when the arc of its practice is emerging or, just as importantly, when to hold off and wait until it has a fuller portfolio of work,” says the League's program director, Anne Rieselbach. (Read our interview with Rieselbach and the League's executive director, Rosalie Genevro, here.) Below, several Emerging Voices alums reflect on what the award meant to them and their careers.