Celebrating 15 years of
Buildner competitions

We try to approach architecture with responsibility and with an optimism that comes from seeing how small changes can matter. Adjustments such as reusing material, reshaping a surface, or improving a shared threshold can influence how people experience their environment. When these changes accumulate, they can help cities move toward futures that are more resilient and more equitable.

We participate in architecture competitions when the brief aligns with a continuing line of inquiry or area of interest in our work.

As designers, we conjure up many different ideas throughout the day. Architecture competitions serve as proving grounds and a platform to test these ideas and sharpen our design sensibility.

We participate in architecture competitions for the thrill of it. Even if the odds of winning are slim, it’s a great experience to give something your whole attention and engage the whole process of envisioning a piece of architecture. This is something that can become quite rare or difficult to achieve in professional practice. The arena of the competition lets you tune out the noise of the world.


Architecture competitions provide a space to explore ideas without the constraints of conventional practice. They encourage us to move beyond the immediate demands of professional projects and address design issues at broader, even global, scales. Competitions offer opportunities for rigorous experimentation, collaboration, and growth, allowing us to develop visionary approaches while remaining engaged with the critical debates and responsibilities that define the field of architecture.

My primary motivation is to bridge the gap between academic theory and professional reality. While my university education has provided me with a strong conceptual foundation, I believe that true growth comes from navigating the constraints and complexities of real-world problems. Participating in this competition is an opportunity for me to step out of my academic comfort zone, challenge my problem-solving skills against tangible constraints, and gain the practical insights essential for my future career as an architect. More importantly, I want to move beyond "paper architecture" to create solutions that are not only visually compelling but also structurally viable and contextually responsive. This competition challenges me to consider the lifecycle of a building, material efficiency, and the actual user experience—elements that are often idealized in a purely academic setting.

This is Radix Design’s first architectural competition.  As a small firm, we don’t typically have enough surplus time or budget to support what it takes to produce a quality entry.  However, this competition was so close to home, and so immediately related to the things we are passionate about in our everyday work, that we felt it was worthwhile to commit ourselves to a deeply challenging month of developing the competition entry while still keeping the business going.  

We use competitions as a way to collaborate, explore new ideas, and push our skills. They let us step outside constraints of everyday work, experiment freely, and simply have fun creating with friends.

I enter design competitions because they force me to stretch the boundaries of my work. They often have to be undertaken quickly, which forces me to think and act with clarity and to work instinctively. Competitions also provide crucial peer review of my ideas and their communication. Where a traditional theoretical researcher can write a paper and have it peer reviewed, a design competition – especially one where the entrants cannot identify themselves – gets your ideas in front of international experts who are basing their opinions and judgements solely on the work put before them, and not on who has created it, where they’re from, or their motivations for entering the competition in the first instance. Competitions are crucial for demonstrating the deployability of my work outside my own city. There are very few such opportunities to get valued outside opinions and to demonstrate that an idea can scale.

I see architectural competitions as fields where I can think more freely than in everyday practice. For me, they act as a laboratory for testing new typologies, developing more speculative ideas about material and structure, and challenging my own design approach. Competitions also allow me to see the work of international juries and other participants, which helps me place my own work within a broader context. In short, I choose to take part in competitions to develop myself professionally and to further clarify my portfolio, my way of thinking, and my design language.