Hello Wood Builder Summit | Europe's [Future] Building Festival

During the ten-day architecture camp and festival, teams of students build lasting installations under the guidance of their instructors - the Builder Summit participants will explore the theme of demolition and building. The festival will also include a central installation serving as a sanctuary of construction – a spiritual space and event area. On the last day, the event will be celebrated with a music mini-festival open to all in the post-apocalyptic crater of the Zalahaláp basalt quarry. The occasion, featuring stars of international architecture, will be organised by Hello Wood architecture studio.

The Builder Summit closely embraces the values of the Builder Method, Hello Wood's participatory and action-based alternative education methodology. The Builder Method is based on the holy trinity of building the project, building the participant and building the community.

Closed and abandoned mines/quarries are a kind of landscape scars that create an exciting situation: producing building materials inevitably entails demolition. Next summer, Hello Wood's art festival will explore the ambivalence of a mountain dismantled by man, the relationship between intervention and naturalness, demolition and building, absence, emptiness and replenishment. As the pandemic fundamentally reinterpreted our daily life, the war, the economic and climate crisis, the question of demolition and reconstruction are not relevant from an architectural point of view only; the Builder Summit also responds to the social situation.

Hello Wood, a multi-award-winning architecture studio, has been delivering building projects from design to construction for ten years. Their unique, site-specific, community-building structures and installations are a global statement of their commitment to innovative and sustainable architecture. The two key features of their projects are that they are constructed mainly of wood and combine an artistic approach with social considerations.

Their Design & Build projects are driven by innovation, social responsibility and a commitment to quality design. Their focus is to build communities through science and art and to make architecture understandable and a joy to the public. Experiential education of future designers is important to them and they have launched their now world-renowned education programme both in Hungary and abroad.