INSTITUTIONS

A guide to institutions championing traditional architecture and sustainable design.

Research, reports and essay resources
What is Achieve Fest?

INTBAU

INTBAU is a global network dedicated to creating better places to live through traditional building, architecture, and urbanism. INTBAU was established in 2001, and has since gained over 30 chapters and nearly 8,000 members in more than 100 countries worldwide. The organisation works under the patronage of their founder, The former Prince of Wales. INTBAU’s mission is to support traditional building, the maintenance of local character, and the creation of better places to live. They do this through workshops, summer schools, study tours, conferences, awards, and competitions.

What is Achieve Fest?

The Prince’s Foundation

Headquartered at Dumfries House, the Prince's Foundation is an educational charity established in 1986 by HRH The Prince of Wales to teach and demonstrate in practice those principles of traditional urban design and architecture.  The work of The Prince’s Foundation is inspired by The Prince of Wales’s philosophy of harmony: that by understanding the balance, the order and the relationships between ourselves and the natural world we can create a more sustainable future. For more than 40 years His Royal Highness has been at the forefront of championing sustainability. During the last decade the impact of natural resource depletion, climate change and rapid urbanisation has become evident and widely understood. The work of The Prince’s Foundation is inspired by the belief that only by taking a holistic view can we create a sustainable future to meet the needs of our world. The Prince's Foundation runs a variety of programs for built environment students such as the Prince's Foundation Summer School and the Building Craft Programme.

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The Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture

The Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at the University of Cambridge was established in 2021 as a collaboration between the two constituent Departments of the University’s Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, working with the Faculty of Classics.  It has been generously funded for the three-year period 2021-24 by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit of Sweden.  The Centre exists to offer a forum for research and the exchange of ideas concerning all aspects of the classical architectural tradition, across time and place, and to provide a Summer School for students interested in learning about classical architectural practice.  The Centre is housed, and holds many of its activities, at the Neo-classical Downing College, Cambridge.

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Turquoise Mountain

Turquoise Mountain was founded in 2006 by HRH The Prince of Wales to revive historic areas and traditional crafts, to provide jobs, skills and a renewed sense of pride. Since 2006, Turquoise Mountain has restored over 150 historic buildings, trained over 15,000 artisans, treated over 165,000 patients at our Kabul clinic, and supported and generated over $17 million in sales of traditional crafts to international clients, including Kate Spade and London’s Connaught Hotel. Turquoise Mountain has also curated major international exhibitions at museums around the world, from the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. Turquoise Mountain has now built over 50 small businesses in Afghanistan, Myanmar, and the Middle East, supporting a new generation of artisan entrepreneurs who will not only drive economic development, but also preserve their unique cultures and traditions.

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Willowbank

Willowbank is an independent educational institution located on the Willowbank National Historic Site and in the village centre of Queenston, Ontario, along the Canada-United States border. It operates a School of Restoration Arts which offers a three-year post-secondary diploma in conservation skills and theory, and a Centre for Cultural Landscape, a forum for cultural landscape theory and practice in Canada and the world. Willowbank was created from the rescue of a 19th-century estate which today forms the centre of its campus, and it is one of a handful of Canadian organisations of which Charles III is Royal Patron.

What is Achieve Fest?

Boulouki

Boulouki is an interdisciplinary research collaborative, whose work is focused on the study of traditional building techniques and materials. In Greek Boulouki means “gaggle”, travelling group, a name evoking the tradition of travelling companies of stone masons and craftsmen. Its aim is to trace and document the living carriers of such traditional knowledge; to study and to further disseminate it through workshops and actual building projects which are organized in collaboration with local communities. Based upon these thematic axes, the group’s course of action includes conducting research, organizing workshops, conferences and cultural events; promoting projects in collaboration with local communities and their stakeholders.  So far, Boulouki has mostly worked in Epirus, a mountainous area of Greece, once celebrated for its stone masons, and also a crossroads for various Balkan cultures. Our aim is to develop a ‘hands-on’ approach of cultural heritage, through the processes of making, repairing and building, to contribute to the study of traditional building techniques as an operative field of knowledge, orientated -apart from conservation and documentation- towards contemporary building practices.​ Until this day, Boulouki has developed a network of partners from major academic institutions in Greece, such as the National Technical University of Athens, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Patras and the University of Ioannina, while renowned professors from various disciplines and practitioners from the fields of restoration and heritage management have given lectures and presented their work in Boulouki’s workshops.​ Since May 2018, Boulouki operates as an Urban Non-Profit Company, based in Athens.

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Suikoushya International Craft School

Suikoushya International Craft School specialises in traditional Japanese woodworking courses in Kyoto. The course caters for an international audience and is run by the craftsman Kawai Takami. Aside from his teaching commitments, Takami is a maker and a business owner, and runs a design and construction practice specialising in traditional Japanese homes.

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