Buildner is pleased to announce the results of its Architect's Chair Competition Edition 4, an annual international competition that invites architects and designers worldwide to submit designs for a signature chair. Following in the footsteps of iconic figures like Charles and Ray Eames, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Arne Jacobsen, participants are tasked with creating custom chairs that reflect their unique design philosophies and visions.
Buildner has published two books on the topic, highlighting key ideas and outstanding projects from its past editions.
Chair design exemplifies the interdisciplinary nature of architecture, showcasing architects' ability to adapt skills and sensibilities across scales and contexts, blurring the lines between architecture, design, and art. This versatility empowers architects to explore new ideas and challenge conventional notions of chair aesthetics, materials, and technology.
Following the conclusion of this fourth edition, Buildner has also announced the launch of Architect's Chair Competition Edition 5, inviting a new round of proposals from architects and designers for a signature chair that reflects their individual style and vision.
Buildner's other ongoing competitions include The Unbuilt Award 2026, celebrating visionary unbuilt projects across three scales, with a 100,000 EUR prize fund; The Architect's Stair Edition #3, a conceptual exploration of one of architecture's most symbolic elements; and The Next House: USA, which invites innovative ideas for a new American suburban prototype: a home that is compact yet generous, adaptable yet grounded, replicable yet sensitive to place.
Projects:
First Prize Winner
Project title: Eero chair
Author: Sergei Grigorev, from Cyprus
Eero Chair is a minimal wooden chair designed around coherence, sculpted transitions, and the expressive potential of solid timber. The form focuses on continuity between planes, using carved junctions and softened geometries to create a fluid relationship between legs, armrests, seat, and back. Each component is shaped to provide ergonomic comfort without adding superfluous detail, relying instead on the visual warmth and structural clarity of natural wood. The chair is developed as a fully crafted object—from joinery to surface treatment—emphasizing durability and aesthetic longevity. Subtle shifts in thickness, curvature, and edge profiles guide the eye through the piece, revealing refinements that become visible only at close range. While its appearance is calm and understated, the design incorporates careful material efficiency, ensuring strength at key junctions while maintaining a light presence in space. Through this combination of sculptural restraint and precise woodworking, the chair achieves a balanced, contemporary character suited for both domestic and architectural settings.
Second Prize Winner + Buildner Student Award
Project title: Silent Equilibrium
Authors: Jimin Oh and Eunseo Shin, from South Korea, students at ENSAPLV - Paris La Villette - Architecture
Silent Equilibrium is a minimal wooden chair that investigates balance, emptiness, and proportion through references to Korean spatial philosophy. The design is centered around the idea of a "structural void," using the space between seat and frame as an active compositional element rather than something to be filled. Its form combines straight, geometric members with a gently curved seat, creating a dialogue between firmness and softness. Constructed in pine with traditional joinery—mortise and tenon, three-way mitre, and sliding dovetail—the chair relies on craftsmanship rather than metal fasteners. The laminated curved seat provides flexibility and comfort while maintaining a light, refined profile. Through clear lines, controlled geometry, and an emphasis on structural clarity, the chair becomes both an object of contemplation and a functional seating solution rooted in a restrained architectural sensibility.
Third Prize Winner
Project title: Hills modular soft furniture collection
Author: Andrii Kovalskyi, from Ukraine
Hills is a modular soft-furniture collection composed of simple cylindrical volumes that can be grouped, repeated, or used individually to form flexible seating landscapes. Each element is based on a consistent geometric language—a rounded vertical cylinder—varying only in height. The modules can function as independent stools or combine into larger compositions, allowing users to shape spatial arrangements according to context and scale. The project takes cues from natural topographies, using repetition and soft geometry to evoke the feel of clustered hills or cloud-like formations. Instead of defining a single orientation or fixed function, the system emphasizes openness: modules can serve as seats, loungers, informal gathering points, or sculptural installations depending on their arrangement. In its minimal form, the collection's vocabulary and adaptability enable it to transition easily between domestic, public, and architectural settings while maintaining a quiet, unified visual identity.
Buildner Sustainability Award
Project title: Think Twice
Authors: Ioana-andrada Calin in collaboration with Tabby Bunyan, RE_CONSIDERED; and Mark Smith from Isokon Plus, UK
Think Twice is a public bench constructed entirely from textile waste, transforming discarded fashion materials into a functional piece of urban furniture. Installed in London for the Festival of Architecture, the project demonstrates how reclaimed fabrics can be repurposed into durable, visually expressive architectural components. The bench consists of a plywood structural core clad with "Fabrecos"—compressed, color-rich panels produced from shredded garments sourced from local charity shops and textile recyclers. The design adopts graphic, geometric forms that reference early modernist and Bloomsbury-era artistic languages, creating a visually distinct street-level object that doubles as an advocacy tool. Through form, color, and materiality, the bench frames textile waste as a resource rather than a burden, inviting public engagement with sustainability issues. While primarily conceived as an urban installation, its varied seating typologies—leaning, perching, sitting—expand its spatial usability. The project operates at the intersection of design, environmental awareness, and local community circularity.
Highlighted submissions
Project title: Stra Chair
Authors: Carlos Roberto Marin Soto, from Panama
STRA Chair is developed around the idea of simplicity through layered construction and repeatable components. The sculptural chair is composed of a series of parallel, CNC-cut profiles that stack to form a continuous seat, backrest, and leg geometry, resulting in a visually rhythmic and structurally legible form. Rather than concealing its assembly, the design emphasizes its stratified logic, allowing construction and material thickness to remain readable across the entire object. The chair relies on a limited set of components—side frames, seat layers, and mechanical connectors—assembled through a dry, reversible system that supports efficient fabrication and scalability. Softened radii and the absence of sharp edges create a tactile, user-friendly surface while maintaining a strong graphic identity. Constructed from compressed paper-based composite panels, the chair balances durability with material responsibility, positioning recycled content as a viable alternative to traditional solid timber or plastics.
Project title: Chair S
Author: Niklas Fiedler, from Denmark
Chair S considers how reinforced structure and precise material optimization can redefine the character of a wooden chair. The design positions joints as primary architectural elements, using them to articulate the relationship between leg, apron, seat, and backrest rather than concealing points of connection. By rethinking the structural logic of a traditional side chair, the project transforms areas of typical weakness into defining features through a continuous load path and carefully proportioned geometry. The chair is constructed from multiple smaller wooden components, selected and oriented to follow the natural grain, enhancing both structural performance and material efficiency. Subtle variations in section thickness and curvature generate a restrained yet dynamic silhouette while maintaining ergonomic comfort. The system is conceived to be scalable, allowing the same structural principles to be adapted across different seating typologies, from dining chairs to lounge versions. The chair is manufactured through a combination of precise joinery and repeatable production processes, resulting in a fully wooden assembly with no reliance on concealed metal reinforcements.
Project title: Asana Chair
Author: Poorvi Gupta from the United States
Asana Chair investigates how posture, alignment, and stillness can be translated into a physical seating form. Inspired by the Sukhasana, or cross-legged yoga pose, the chair reinterprets sitting as an active, balanced state rather than a fixed position. The design is structured around a continuous S-shaped frame that traces the natural curvature of the spine, rising from the ground to form the seat and extending upward into the backrest as a single, flowing gesture. This looped geometry provides both structural stability and visual continuity, allowing the chair to support multiple postures, including cross-legged, upright, and semi-reclined sitting. The seat platform is suspended within the frame, enabling subtle shifts in weight that encourage ongoing postural engagement. Each curve is derived from ergonomic studies and sketching over human figures, translating bodily alignment into controlled geometry. The chair is constructed from bent laminated ash, selected for its strength, flexibility, and ability to maintain smooth radii through lamination, with a seat surface upholstered in organic linen to enhance breathability and tactile comfort.
Project title: Filet Chair
Authors: Estelle Bureau and Simon Ratte-berube, from Université du Québec à Montréal - UQAM, Canada
Filet Accent Chair explores lightness, separation, and precision through a restrained wooden construction that emphasizes joinery as both structure and expression. The design is organized around a subtle gap between seat and backrest, creating a visual "thread" of separation that allows light to pass through while maintaining structural continuity. Rather than relying on concealed reinforcements, the chair uses cross-bracing, dowels, and clearly articulated joints to distribute loads and stabilize the frame. Seat and backrest elements appear detached from the supporting structure, reinforcing the perception of lightness while remaining firmly anchored through precise connections. The geometry is reduced to planar surfaces and straight members, allowing proportions and junctions to define the chair's character. Manufactured through a combination of solid wood components and CNC-assisted fabrication, the chair balances traditional woodworking logic with repeatable production accuracy, using solid timber sections sized for durability and long-term structural performance.
Project title: Duetta
Authors: Olivia G Smith and Nia D Douglas-kirksey, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
Duetta is conceived as a hybrid piece of furniture, operating alternately as a functional chair and as a table or shelf when reconfigured. Its design is organized around a pivoting backrest element that rotates to redefine the object's use, allowing the seat and back to exchange roles without introducing additional components. The structure is composed of solid wood members arranged to maintain stability in both configurations, with the load paths recalibrated through the hinge axis and supporting frame geometry. Material contrast between primary and secondary elements reinforces the dual reading of the object while clarifying its transformation logic. The chair is fabricated from solid ash, with accent components in walnut, combining CNC-milled parts for dimensional accuracy with traditional joinery techniques such as doweling and lap joints to ensure structural continuity across moving interfaces.
Readers interested in participating in the next annual Architect's Chair Competition are encouraged to visit the Architect's Chair Competition Edition 5 website, to register before 2 April 2026.
