The Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Reports is a new digital series, created in lieu of live lectures for the 2020 Emerging Voices program. While two of the year’s eight winners presented as planned, the remaining six winners produced original videos to share their work after live events were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The reports include a 12-minute video by Marc Blouin and Catherine Orzes of Quebec-based Blouin Orzes. The video includes documentation of their work in the northern Canadian region of Nunavik, where they have been designing projects in collaboration with the Inuit community for the past decade.
The video includes documentation of the designers’ extensive work with typologies unique to the the North—including an extensive co-op network of stores and hotels, large-scale community freezers, and northern warehousing facilities.
According to the Architectural League of New York, Blouin Orzes architectes’ work is attuned to native tradition and environmental issues, deftly adapting to the needs and limitations of the harsh northern climate.
“Our work is not just about designing and building. It is about ‘accompanying’ our clients as best we can, from the very beginnings of a project till its final realization,” said the principals to the Architectural League of New York.
The selection process for the two-stage jury included past Emerging Voices winners and other design professionals from across North America, who reviewed work from approximately 50 firms.
This year’s other Emerging Voices recipients are:
Brandon Dake, Andrew Wells
Dake Wells Architecture, Springfield and Kansas City, MO
Lazbent Pavel Escobedo Amaral, Andrés Soliz Paz
Escobedo Soliz, Mexico City, Mexico
Casper Mork-Ulnes
Mork Ulnes Architects, San Francisco, CA and Oslo, Norway
Olalekan Jeyifous
New York, NY
Miriam Peterson, Nathan Rich
Peterson Rich Office, New York, NY
Christopher Marcinkoski, Andrew Moddrell
PORT, Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA
Bryan Young
Young Projects, New York, NY