30 Years of Emerging Voices: Idea, Form, Resonance

As Emerging Voices winners in 1997, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi are featured in this edition edited by the Architectural League looking back on 30 years of the award. 

From the Architectural League: "An unprecedented collection of design projects and practices, 30 Years of Emerging Voices: Idea, Form, Resonance documents close to 250 of the most innovative North American design firms of the past three decades. Since 1982 The Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices program has recognized architects, land­scape architects, and urban designers whose distinctive voices promise to influence architectural discourse, design, and practice for years to come. Insightful essays and commentaries by leading critics, architects, and historians consider and contextualize the continuing impact of the Emerging Voices’ inventive work on architectural culture and the built environment."

An exert mentioning Weiss and MAnfredi from the book says: "It was time to get clean. It was time to get dirty. On the side of cleanliness, Enrique Norten (EV94), Neil Denari (EV95), Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri (EV95), Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto (EV96), Karen Fairbanks and Scott Marble (EV98), Michael Maltzan (EV98), and others-some among them deploying the then-brand-new computational tools that enabled iterative versioning of complex folds and compound curves-unrolled smooth and swoopy terrains of synthetic surfaces and pliant continuities. On the side of dirt, Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich (EV94), Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe (EV95), Kathryn Dean and Charles Wolf (EV97), Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss (EV97), and others combined their interests in craft-driven material practices, in trees and rocks, in hyperarticulate tectonics, and in historical industrial and vernacular typologies-pounding together landscapes of floating planes, revealed edges, and the blackest, steeliest, beamiest black-steel beams, ever.

Time brings convergences. The evermore- thoughtful Weiss and Manfredi have heroically pushed their work to its seemingly opposed extremes, abandoning merely naturalistic craftiness for landscapes of actual nature, sheathed in and balanced by structures of sleek technology."