Adaptive reuse projects honored in Re:Form – New Life for Old Spaces competition 

Architectural competition platform Buildner just announced the results of its ‘Re:Form – New Life for Old Spaces’ competition, an ideas challenge that invited entries to breathe new life into neglected and forgotten spaces. Participants were asked to “explore how adaptive reuse can offer sustainable and socially meaningful alternatives to demolition and new construction.”

“This inaugural edition of Re-Form was met with an outstanding response, underscoring the growing global interest in sustainability-driven, community-focused reuse projects,” organizers said. “Designers embraced the open framework of the brief to propose inventive interventions — some deeply contextual, others radically speculative — that demonstrate architecture’s power to turn overlooked structures into vibrant, functional spaces that serve contemporary needs.”

Below, we have set out the winners of the competition.

1st Prize Winner

Edge of presence by Parisima Davoudi

Jury comment: Set within a desolate brick kiln landscape on the periphery of a fractured society, this project proposes a deeply symbolic and restorative spatial intervention. It is organized through three conceptual layers: a hidden shelter embedded within the earth, a transitional zone of medicinal halophyte plants that thrive in harsh soil conditions, and a social presence layer expressed as a linear market for community use. The intervention transforms a marginalized terrain into a subtle topography of renewal—balancing concealment and exposure, memory and regeneration. Rather than imposing architectural form as spectacle, the project draws its power from absence, erosion, and soil. Materiality is kept elemental—sun-dried brick, reclaimed stone, and earthen walls—while a singular vertical marker on the horizon reclaims a visual identity for a forgotten place. The planting strategy, though restrained, underscores cycles of resilience in nature and community. With its spare but evocative drawings, sectional poetics, and haunting imagery, the proposal uses minimal means to render a powerful statement on land, identity, and quiet endurance.

2nd Prize Winner and Buildner Student Award

SINKTOPIA by Lee Hyunwoo and Lee Hyeonbok

Jury comment: Set in the context of South Korea’s vulnerable semi-basement dwellings—often stigmatized, flood-prone, and socially marginalized—this proposal reimagines the lowest levels of urban habitation as sites of environmental innovation and social renewal. Titled Sinktopia, the project introduces an architectural retrofit that transforms a standard banjiha unit into a water-harvesting, food-producing, community-serving node. At the heart of the intervention is a stormwater collection and purification system integrated below a raised access floor, enabling the repurposed space to serve as a smart farm and micro-marketplace. A formerly sealed facade is reopened to the street, creating a sunken courtyard and enhancing spatial permeability. Interior environments are characterized by controlled lighting, industrial clarity, and productive plant life—shifting the narrative from deprivation to dignity. The scheme is supported by a precise technical layout including plumbing diagrams, structural retrofits, and programmatic overlays, while photorealistic renderings humanize the space and demonstrate its lived potential. The result is an architecturally grounded, socially conscious proposition that addresses climate resilience and urban inequality through localized, small-scale transformation.

3rd Prize Winner

It started with grain by Damian Świerzbiński and Kamila Jagieniak

Jury comment: This project reclaims and reinterprets a post-industrial relic—a grain silo in Poland. Titled 'It Started with Grain', the proposal transforms a derelict grain tower into a vertical public pavilion, evoking the symbolic and literal significance of grain as a foundational element of civilization. The intervention operates as both a spatial archive and a cultural commentary, inviting visitors to ascend through layers of history and meaning. Each level—rooted in metaphors of botanical growth (roots, stem, head)—offers a distinct spatial experience, from immersive installations to seeds exhibitions and contemplation chambers. The surrounding site is reactivated with landscape gestures and educational programming, while the architecture itself becomes a vessel for self-reflection and environmental awareness. Presented with a richly layered graphic style, the board integrates historical references, axonometrics, architectural drawings, and atmospheric interior views, all embedded within a timeline-framed visual language that contextualizes the proposal in Poland’s socio-political past and ecological future.

Buildner Sustainability Award

Phototropism Chimney by Hwanseo Lee, Kuenwoo Park, and Hyeonjin Cho

Jury comment: Phototropism Chimney envisions the transformation of a disused warehouse in Lagonegro into a hybridized space of residence, co-working, and communal gathering. Anchored by the metaphor of phototropism—plants' orientation toward light—the design channels light and energy through a central vertical chimney, organizing space around solar orientation and thermal performance. The proposal overlays contemporary programmatic needs atop the existing industrial structure, choreographing zones of privacy and collectivity while maximizing daylight, passive heating/cooling, and re-use of embodied resources. Solar studies and environmental diagrams inform decisions such as window placement, aluminum shading systems, and the integration of rainwater harvesting and recycled materials. The architectural language respects the building’s historic character while activating it for 21st-century living. 

More information on all winning entries can be found on Buildner’s official website.