Join a community making with wood in real time at full scale. StickBuilt is a 5-day outdoor cross-disciplinary Design/Build intensive for rising 4th & 5th-year architecture students and architectural professionals & educators.

May 20-24, 2025
Birmingham, AL

Student applications open February 10, 2025. Stay tuned and follow us on Instagram for more information.

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Description

StickBuilt is an invitation to inhabit an ad hoc community of designers immersed in the work and play of practicing architecture without walls. While living and working in the woods alongside the Little Cahaba River, participants engage with the uniquely instructive challenge of visioning, making, and improvising with wood in real time at 1:1 scale.

Design teams are small, comprising three to five students and a pair of architectural professionals. Responding together to place and prompt, we access the engrossing, intensive process of bringing a project to completion in an abbreviated time frame with a simple kit of tools and materials. Unexpected forms arise from a limited material palette of minimally-processed timber. Novel ideas emerge from a familiar discipline.

StickBuilt strives to cultivate an environment in which the closely-focused work of applied timber research and project execution is leavened throughout by a sense of freedom, openness, and interconnection. It starts by bringing together a diverse cohort of participants from a wide range of academies and firms. Workdays are bookended by communal meals and presentations that broaden context, provide surprising juxtapositions, and poke holes in the envelope of our discipline’s silo. Fields represented in our 2024 slate of presentations included: architecture, art, rural wastewater management, poetry, conservation biology, dance, music, and furniture making. These cross-disciplinary offerings and dialogues embody the spirit of Gertrude Stein’s remark: “And then there is using everything.”

StickBuilt believes in the simple, clarifying power of stepping outside. Outside of doors, in the most literal sense. Outside of conventional architectural institutions, outside of conventional architectural perspectives, outside of conventional architectural motivations. Outside of ourselves, and into the spontaneous sweep and flow of creative community where new ideas and viewpoints collide and combine in unpredictable ways.

Above all, StickBuilt is about the pleasure of pure, spontaneous learning and discovery that happens when we engage freely and directly with the material world itself.

FAQ

StickBuilt is open to architectural professionals, educators, and rising 4th & 5th-year architecture students.
Student participation is by application. Interested professionals and educators should contact stickbuilt@stickarch.com for more information.
StickBuilt cohorts are small by design, with space for roughly 12 students and 6 professionals/educators each year. Participants should come prepared to be mentally and physically challenged over five very full days. Prior design/build experience is not a prerequisite.
For students, StickBuilt is an unconventional opportunity to put developing craft into active practice while bridging the academic year and summer pursuits. It’s a way to collaborate and network with members of firms and academic institutions from around the region and the country. And it represents a chance to add unique tools to your design toolkit headed into the final years of study.
For practicing architects and educators, StickBuilt is a chance to step outside the confines of the office or the institution, reconnect the head and the hand, and get reacquainted with the passion and sense of possibility that leads us to architecture in the first place.
Student applications for StickBuilt ‘25 will open February 10. An application link will appear at the top of this website.
Follow us on Instagram to get an announcement in early February.
Tuition for this year’s event will be announced when applications open.
We strive to make StickBuilt accessible to all. There will be opportunities for financial aid and work-trade if tuition is a barrier to entry.
Participants should come prepared to live and work outdoors for five days and four nights.
The site features bathroom & shower facilities. All meals, tools, and design/build supplies are provided.
StickBuilt is a non-for-profit offering of Stick Architecture, a small firm based in Birmingham, in partnership with Your Town Alabama, a 501(c)(3) that inspires and educates Alabamians to use asset-based design for setting and achieving community goals.

Testimonial

“When you emailed me last year about the idea of participating in StickBuilt, I knew it could be good, but not in my wildest dreams did I think it would be this good. It was a life-changing experience.

Everything was harmonious, from working outdoors in the woods next to the river, building relationships, working together and learning how to manage healthy design conflicts, having conversations and stories during meals, listening to presentations, getting to learn about fiddling and dancing, to making friends for life in such a short period. This whole learning experience for me was second to none. Everyone involved was just so humble, friendly, and engaging.

Designing, collaborating, carrying loads of 2x4s and 6s and cutting and screwing them all day, then getting to bed very tired in complete healthy darkness while hearing the river flowing wasn't only satisfying, but also rewarding, both physically and mentally.

Being part of the first StickBuilt was an honor and a privilege that I'm going to hold dear to my heart for the rest of my life.”

-Student Participant, StickBuilt 2024