Avery Thorne & Matthew Beecroft win Client Favorite award!

2B students Avery Thorne and Matthew Beecroft have been announced as the winners of the Client Favorite award in Buildner's Yoga House in the Bog international design competition!

The project statement describes Atkape as a reflection of Latvian culture, spiritualism and connection to the land. Atkape means retreat symbolizing the Yoga House as a sanctuary where users may retreat to nature seek peace and rest.

For this competition, designers were asked to submit ideas for a yoga house to be located in a Latvian bog on a forested site adjacent to the Baltic Sea. The yoga house is intended to connect guests with the natural surroundings. The brief requested designs for a small building that interacts harmoniously with its unique and sensitive environment, one with the potential to be both iconic and a positive example of green building practices.

Buildner collaborated with an international jury with rich experiences designing buildings of this scale and ambition: Xuanru Chen is a lead architect at Shanghai-based ZJJZ Atelier; Olha Kleytman is Founder of SBM studio based in Kharkiv, Ukraine; Nicolas Lapierre is Founding Partner of Atelier L'Abri, a Montreal based architecture studio specializing in ecological, healthy and sustainable construction; Marco Lavit founded his architecture and design practice, Atelier LAVIT, in Paris in 2014; Anna Maria Orrù works in biomimicry, artistic/design research and in curating performative ‘hands-on’ research, providing alternative approaches to ecological design and sustainability, and is an Affiliated Senior Lecturer at Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design and co-founder of Nordic Biomimicry, a center dedicated to collaborating with nature as a mentor, measure and method; Judson Moore is the Design Director at Portland, Oregon-based Waechter Architecture; Carine Pimenta, Daniel Zamarbide and Galliane Zamarbide are architects and Partner of Geneva and Lisbon based BUREAU; Tom Schroeder is a senior architect with Patkau Architects and a guest critic / adjunct faculty at the University of British Columbia; and Yimeng Teng is a project architect at Ro Rockett Design, an award winning design firm based in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Aspen.