Architecture Design Competitions & Events For Students
Shape the future with wood.
Student News + Updates
Curious what's happening in the world of wood design? Think Wood offers students meaningful ways to accelerate their understanding of wood solutions—from keeping tabs on upcoming student design competitions to exploring events and scholarship opportunities worth having on your radar. We regularly update this page with award-winning student work that raises the bar for designing with wood. Have a brain for grain? Drop by often!
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Competition | Hack-A-House: A 24-hour Hackathon Competition Addressing Housing Challenges2024 Hack-A-House Competition Tackles Challenges in Housing
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Event | Managing Mass Timber: From Forest to FutureKent State University Hosts Inaugural Managing Mass Timber: From Forest to Future
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Event | Buildfest 2024Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival Showcases 7 Interactive Outdoor Installations Built with Wood
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Competition | Timber in the City 5: Urban HabitatsUrban Habitats Competition Challenges Architecture Students to Increase Urban Density with Wood Designs
Project Profiles by Think Wood
See what’s possible when designers think beyond conventional materials. These real-world examples show wood construction at its finest—from mass timber structures to light-frame buildings. Perfect for research, inspiration, or understanding how sustainable principles translate to the built environment.
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Commercial | Mass TimberHouston Endowment Headquarters
When a concrete structure proved too costly and cumbersome, the design team turned to a lighter, nimbler mass timber-and-steel solution that cut structural costs by 50%. -
CommercialProposed 55-story building highlights mass timber’s towering potential
When a concrete structure proved too costly and cumbersome, the design team turned to a lighter, nimbler mass timber-and-steel solution that cut structural costs by 50%. -
Hospitality | Light-Frame Construction | Mass TimberHip Hotel Tackles Taxing Terrain with Mass Timber
When a concrete structure proved too costly and cumbersome, the design team turned to a lighter, nimbler mass timber-and-steel solution that cut structural costs by 50%.
Explore Opportunities
Upcoming
BuildFest 2: Peace Rises
This fall, Build Fest 2: Peace Rises will transform the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival into an open-air showcase of wood innovation and collaborative design. As part of the 2025 Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival, 10 faculty-led student teams from across the U.S. will construct interactive wood installations over five days—living, working, and building on the very site where music and counterculture once reshaped a generation. Selected through a national call, the projects range from a robotically fabricated timber cabin designed by a student team from Princeton to a reconfigurable monolith designed by a team from Cornell.…- Architecture
AIAS Midwest Quad Conference – ARCH+
Architecture students: Register now to experience mass timber innovation at ARCH+, the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) Midwest Quad Conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Brought to you by Think Wood and co-hosted by the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and Drury University, this year’s conference offers hands-on opportunities to explore the future of sustainable design. Join a mass timber design charette, experience the “Managing Mass Timber: Forest-to-Future” exhibit showcasing every step of mass timber—from sustainable forest management to prefabricated construction—and see how it stacks up against traditional building materials. Grow your knowledge, fuel your creativity, and discover how…- Architecture
AIAS Northeast Quad Conference – RESURGE
Register now and join Think Wood’s education team at RESURGE this October to connect with the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) chapters and peers from across the Northeast at the University at Buffalo’s Northeast Quad Conference! RESURGE celebrates Buffalo’s transformation—turning its rich industrial heritage and urban challenges into a future of innovation, renewal, and architectural excellence. The city’s rich design culture—home to landmark works by Louis Sullivan, Henry Hobson Richardson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others—will be explored through guided tours of Buffalo’s iconic buildings, including the Darwin Martin House, Greatbatch Pavilion, Coles House, Lafayette Hotel, Assembly House, Guaranty Building,…- Architecture
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Buildfest 2024
BuildFest 2024—part of the Bethel Woods Art & Architecture Festival, an annual event promoting sustainability and community engagement with students and educators—challenged participants to explore the evolving relationship between digital and analog fabrication. It was also an opportunity for architecture students to gain hands-on experience designing and building with common materials. Teams from 17 leading architecture programs submitted proposals for this one-of-a-kind event, and seven were chosen to create interactive, wood-centric installations on the iconic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival. Participating teams gathered at Bethel Woods for several days to construct and showcase their installations to the public in…- Architecture
Managing Mass Timber: From Forest to Future
“Managing Mass Timber: From Forest to Future” is a traveling exhibit showcasing the benefits of mass timber to students and faculty at leading engineering, architecture, and construction management schools across the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. During the fall of 2024, the exhibit traveled to Kent State University; Syracuse University; the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) Region 3 Conference in Chicago; Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh; the AIAS Northeast Quad Conference; and the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) Annual Conference in Baltimore.- Construction Management
Upcoming
Timber in the City 6: Urban Habitats
Think Wood in partnership with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is pleased to announce TIMBER IN THE CITY 6: Urban Habitats Competition for the 2025 academic year. This national design competition invites architecture students—working individually or in teams—to explore how innovative wood construction can help meet the growing demand for attainable, sustainable housing in our urban areas. Participants are challenged to design for a real underutilized site, using wood to interpret, invent, and deploy forward-thinking building systems. The goal is to unlock housing types that fall between single-family homes and high-rise apartment buildings—typologies that increase housing diversity…- Architecture
Hack-A-House: A 24-hour Hackathon Competition Addressing Housing Challenges
Hack-A-House is an annual 24-hour virtual “hackathon” that calls on undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines including architecture, engineering, real estate development, and public policy to develop innovative solutions for the housing affordability crisis while competing for $12,000 in cash prizes. Participants collaborate with peers, industry experts, and competition judges to explore and address housing challenges in one of three categories: Innovation Incentives, Single-Family Housing Densification, and Housing Safety Net.- Architecture
- Construction Management
- Engineering
2025 Hack-a-House
Are you an undergraduate or graduate student who has ideas about how to address the housing crisis? Join the Hack-a-House student competition that sparks the kind of thinking that prepares students to lead real-world change in their future careers. Hosted by Ivory Innovations—a non-profit focused on catalyzing solutions to housing affordability—and sponsored by Think Wood, Hack-a-House is a hackathon-style event where student teams across the country gather online to tackle today’s most pressing housing challenges through ideas that challenge everything from affordability to zoning to construction innovation using new materials like mass timber. Compete for over $12,000 in prizes across…- Architecture
- Construction Management
- Engineering
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Timber in the City 5: Urban Habitats
Timber in the City 5: Urban Habitats Competition—sponsored by Think Wood and hosted by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA)—challenged architecture students nationwide to explore innovative uses of wood in urban construction. Now in its fifth iteration since its launch in 2012, the competition continues to push the boundaries of timber design. For the 2023-2024 challenge, participants tackled the urgent need for increased urban density by proposing wood-based overbuilds—innovative vertical additions—atop existing structures. Their task? Select a centrally located building or piece of infrastructure in a busy urban hub and design a wood solution that expands usable space…- Architecture
