Join a community making with wood in real time at full scale. StickBuilt is a 5-day outdoor cross-disciplinary design-build intensive for 3rd & 4th-year architecture students, as well as architecture professionals and educators.
May 20-24, 2025
Birmingham, AL
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.
2025 Architect Participants
More coming soon!
Advisory Committee
Hosted By
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FAQ
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StickBuilt is open to architecture students who will have completed their 3rd or 4th year of study by the time of the event, as well as architectural professionals and educators. StickBuilt cohorts are small by intention, with space for roughly twelve students and six professionals/educators each year.
Student participation is by application. Interested professionals and educators should contact stickbuilt@stickarch.com for more information.
Participants should come prepared to be mentally and physically challenged over five very full days. Prior design/build experience is not a prerequisite.
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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.
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The student application window for StickBuilt ‘25 was February 10 - March 31, 2025.
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Student tuition for StickBuilt ‘25 is $450. This includes all meals and space in the riverside campground.
We strive to make StickBuilt accessible to all. Please reach out about opportunities for financial aid and work-trade if tuition is a barrier to entry.
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Participants should come prepared to live and work outdoors for five days and four nights. All meals and materials are provided.
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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.
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The StickBuilt host site is a 325-acre family forest about ten miles southeast of downtown Birmingham.
Camping, programming, and build sites are located along the Little Cahaba River, which snakes its way through the heart of the property.
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
Contact
stickbuilt@stickarch.com
