After a three-year break, Hello Wood’s builder festival returns to welcome students, architects, and young professionals from all across the world to join the 10-day builder camp to test their wooden construction abilities, learn to collaborate, and participate actively in on-site design and construction. For the first time in Hello Wood’s 13-year history, this year’s workshop takes place at a new location, in the crater of an abandoned basalt quarry on Haláp Mountain in Hungary. The workshop also aligns with and supports Veszprém’s title of 2023 European Capital of Culture, which also includes over a hundred other villages and towns across the Bakony-Balaton region. The event took place between July 6 and 15, ending in a two-day music festival open to all.

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Towers, walkways, decks, cabins and tree houses. Since 2010, the Hello Wood Festival has erected dozens of temporary constructions, with one common denominator: wood. The initiative aims to make knowledge about this material more accessible to everyone, as it has immense potential for the future. However, despite its potential, wood still faces various prejudices within the construction industry. Through the connection between designers and artists from different cultural, academic and professional backgrounds, the event uses construction as a platform for innovation, discussion and knowledge. It offers participants the unique opportunity to experiment with sustainable design and construction methods, encouraging learning through experience, held in a forested area near Budapest, Hungary.

The European Union intends to be climate neutral by 2050. This will require decarbonization at all levels of the economy, and the construction sector will have a particularly key role to play. The sector accounts for around 40% of CO2 emissions globally, and steel and concrete, in particular, require enormous amounts of energy to produce. There needs to be a paradigm shift to replace these building materials and their associated environmental impact. Natural and renewable building materials play a crucial role in this.

Architecture and design studio Hello Wood have created a line of "smart" outdoor furniture for educational institutes and public communal spaces. The two furniture pieces, Fluid Cube and City Snake, re-introduce modular public structures in a contemporary and sustainable way.

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For its tenth year running, Hello Wood is once again hosting its popular international summer school for young architects to help foster a “thinking through making” mentality. The architecture and design studio is putting out an open call for the jubilee event, which is themed around the folklore tradition of Carnival and will give would-be attendees an opportunity to pitch what they feel are the most pressing issues facing our society and how architecture can solve these concerns. The annual event has a global reach, with the previous summer schools participated by 900 students from across 40 countries and 80 universities, including workshop leaders from notable studios such as Kengo Kuma and Urban Think-Tank.

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The third edition of Hello Wood Argentina, the distinctive wood architecture and design festival, has arrived. A creative, professional, and social program, it seeks to teach thinking with your hands and learning through experience.

Masters of wooden architecture and design, Kengo Kuma & Associates, expert of portable architecture, Robert Kronenburg, prestigious architectural and design studios, Local Architecture Network (France) and SKREI (Portugal), and International landscape and urban designers, Groundlab will be some of the most inspiring guests at Hello Wood international summer school & festival for the arts and architecture this coming summer. This year promises to be a unique one as the three-year-long architectural experiment and research programme called Project Village—exploring the relationship between communities and their built environment by building its own settlement—comes to its final stage calling new participants to question, respond to, build on, or dissect the existing artefacts, concepts and ideas. In a special year, special participants are needed: Hello Wood calls for team leaders and students to apply to the summer school and festival (1-9 July 2017) and join the continued exploration of building a community settlement, responding to the theme "Shaping Communities: Courtyards." Read on to see some highlights from the past 7 years of this unique annual event.

Hello Wood is looking for students and young architects, designers, and artists in their Project Village, its 2015 workshop and symposium held 11-19 July. Applications are due before the 16th of May.

This year’s event follows the success of Hello Wood’s workshop in the summer of 2014, which saw participation from over 120 architects, artists and designers from 25 countries. Project Village will examine the typology of the village and the means for its production, proposing new and more efficient methods of master planning and construction. Among the invited team leaders of Hello Wood 2015 are: the founder of Invisible Studio and Studio in the Woods, Piers Taylor; winner of ArchDaily’s Building of the Year 2014 award, Katsuya Fukushima; and founders of 72 Hour Urban Action architectural group. Open Call for students is available here.

Budapest-based art program Hello Wood has put out an open call for Project Village, their 2015 workshop and symposium to be held between July 11 and July 19. This year's event follows the success of Hello Wood's workshop in the summer of 2014, which saw participation from over 120 architects, artists and designers from 25 countries.

Videos

Made from 5,000 pieces of firewood, Hello Wood’s “Charity Tree” installation stretches 11 meters high, 4.5 meters wide and weighs 150 quintals (15,000 kilograms). Hello Wood worked with Design Terminal and the Hungarian Interchurch Aid to build the tree in one of Budapest’s central squares, and all of the firewood used in the temporary installation will be given to families in need in January.

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