A Playful Nod to Building Dreams
Architectenweb Award
In the serious world of Dutch architecture — where skylines are born from calculations and caffeine — the Architectenweb Award is a deliciously cheeky rebellion: a delicate tower of natural wooden blocks that whispers, “Remember that kid who spent entire afternoons lost in the pure fascination of stacking Kapla, building ever higher, dreaming of impossible structures that only a child’s imagination could hold together?”
the living-room floor
Designed by Frank Tjepkema of Tjep. in Amsterdam, this trophy is a quiet love letter to every architect whose career began on the living-room floor, balancing one wooden block on another, discovering gravity, beauty, and the sheer joy of making something stand tall. Crafted from honest, FSC-certified wooden blocks for the category winners and elevated to sleek anodized aluminum for the Architect of the Year, each award is a modular, touchable sculpture — an invitation to keep building, keep dreaming, and never silence the eight-year-old who still believes the next block might just reach the sky.
From Childhood Stacks to Skyline Triumphs
These aren’t cold crystal monuments or heavy bronze statues. They’re warm, tactile wooden blocks — some subtly laser-etched with architectural silhouettes — deliberately simple, endlessly reconfigurable, and joyfully unstable in the best possible way. The aluminum Architect of the Year version adds a cool, contemporary gleam, yet even that one begs to be turned in the hand, admired, and secretly added to when no one is watching.
Honoring the Masters of Form and Fancy
Since its introduction in 2019, the Architectenweb Awards — organised by the Netherlands’ leading platform Architectenweb.nl — have celebrated the country’s boldest talents across categories like Housing, Public Building, Office, Interior, and the coveted Architect van het Jaar. Past winners form a roll-call of Dutch design greatness: Mei architects and planners (multiple victories, including the iconic Fenix I and FENIX), DELVA Landscape Architecture & Urbanism (Architect of the Year 2021), Vakwerk Architecten (2025), Orange Architects, Powerhouse Company, De Zwarte Hond, and many more who continue to shape cities with wit, courage, and sustainability. Each year, a new stack of wooden blocks lands on a new desk — a gentle, joyful reminder that the future of architecture is still built one fascinated layer at a time.
From Tjep.’s whimsical workbench, the Architectenweb Award isn’t just wood or metal — it’s a spark, a tower, a mischievous wink that says: keep the inner child alive, because that kid is the true master builder.