'Let's Build a Beautiful City' summer school 2024

The 2024 edition of our summer school takes place from July 29th until August 15rd in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Applications will open in january 2024. Find for more info at our dedicated summer school page.

Urban design is more important than ever. With the housing crisis, an increasingly vulnerable environment and the threat of climate change, we need to rethink how we approach the building of cities as a society. We cannot afford to create low-quality, short-term solutions - we need to build to sustain, to use less resources in the long term and reduce our environmental impact. We must learn from past mistakes. Many mass housing developments have proven to not be as attractive, and thus as future-proof, as the designers intended. As a society we need more beautiful, attractive places; but how to build these?

Much of the necessary knowledge has been either lost or overlooked by recent generations of architects and urbanists. INTBAU, the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism, was founded to rebuild and spread this knowledge, to improve our built environment, and to create places where people feel at home, productive and happy. Summer schools in countries such as Sweden, Spain and Belgium have proven to be an effective way to inspire a new generation of urbanists to tackle the challenges of today. This is why we chose to organise the Summer School: Let’s Build a Beautiful City!

Teachers

At the Summer School, top-class international architects and urbanists will give lectures and instruct our students in design studios. Some of the best draughtsmen with a deep understanding of traditional and Classical architecture will instruct the students with the basic drawing & designing skills they need to become proficient designers. Names of last year's edition include Alejandro García Hermida, Robert Cox, Conor Lynch, Michael Lykoudis, Jonathan Weatherill, Peter Drijver, Mieke Bosse and many others.

Sustainability

One of the key focuses of this Summer School is to provide our students with the skills to create sustainable environments. Not only energy efficiency matters, but also the use of local, high quality materials and the durability of the urban fabric. Attractiveness, harmony and beauty are essential factors in this mix, but these are sadly often overlooked in current day Architectural & Urban design curricula. This Summer School offers a curriculum in which these factors are key.