Emerging Architect Award - 2021 Recipient

*The Emerging Architect award will be combined with the Emerging Architectural Practice award starting in the Fall 2021. Check out the Emerging Architectural Practice Page for further information.*

This award is to recognize an emerging architect for excellence in design, leadership and/or service to the profession. It is intended that this award will inspire other individuals to become licensed and to strive for excellence in their work.    

As a child, Anya Moryoussef was especially sensitive to her surroundings; to light and dark, joy and anger, emptiness and fullness, strength, and fragility. She lived in many homes; some happy, some bright, some full, some less of all these things. Anya knew a space could make you feel, could change your mood, your sense of security, well-being, productivity, prosperity, potential.

In her admission interview to the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, while presenting a slide show of illuminated sculptures, Anya was asked by one of the three men on the panel, ‘What is the most beautiful space you’ve ever been inside?’

It felt like a question that demanded a spectacular answer, which she did not have. Anya had been inside many beautiful spaces and seen many more, but none was ‘Architecture,’ most weren’t by architects at all.

With that question and its implications, Anya entered school looking outside herself for justification, rationalization, and inspiration. There was a lot of talk about ‘authenticity' at an architecture school strongly rooted in a modernist agenda, but she had yet to define what authenticity meant personally.

In 2011, Anya became Toronto firm Superkül’s first Associate, growing alongside the firm as projects began to take on greater scale and scope. As the sole associate, Anya found herself taking on greater managerial responsibilities, and while the exposure to new dimensions of practice were crucial to her development, a smaller and more intimate scale of practice suited her better.

In 2014, Anya left Superkül to practice her craft on her terms— which were: do ambitious work, support her soon-to-be growing family with her income, and make buildings. She did not regard these expectations as grand, but Anya soon learned how grand they were with the prospects that faced a sole practitioner starting from the ground up. The work she found was predominantly domestic. The scopes were limited. The disjunctions between budgets and aspirations seemingly irreconcilable. But the clients, and their existing homes, were full of promise: they were the assets. On the surface, they were everyday people with modest means who had sought out an architect to uplift their daily lives; looking more deeply, she saw the drama, potential, and beauty in their visions of themselves and their lives. Seeing the intimate and productive symbiosis between occupant and space, empathetically understanding these clients, became, as much as the traditional elements of the architecture itself, the work.

I am honoured to receive this recognition from the RAIC. I am proud to be part of an inspiring generation of young Canadian designers and architects, and grateful to clients, collaborators and mentors with whom I have been able to work and grow. 

Before submitting a proposal, Anya insists on meeting a client at their home. In these visits, she starts to intuit the potential of a client and their space. Anya listens closely to the stories they tell, with no preconceptions about who a client is or the kind of place they want to be inside. The direction is only, and always, to listen, observe, ask questions, and look deeper.