The results of the 2016 Life of an Architect Playhouse Design Competition - featuring creative and whimsical playhouses sure to make any child happy

Judging a playhouse design competition is a lot harder than it sounds. To make things even more interesting, I was able to get Houzz, the National AIA, and the fine folks over at SketchUp involved, and that is a lot of chefs in the kitchen. But we are a resilient group and since this year’s competition was all online, I thought I would turn to my friends and colleagues (subtle difference) and ask them all to review this year’s group of finalists. In all, I had almost 30 judges – ranging in age from 6 to almost 80 years old participate. I had architects, builders, Moms, Dads, High School students (future designers), and College architecture students all follow a mind-numbingly complicated set of instructions to determine this year’s winners.I’d like to thank all of those people for participating because evaluating playhouses is a little subjective – but there are so many other considerations to work through. The picture above is from my friends at Build LLC who evaluated all the entires and as a group, submitted their list of winners. Despite the fact that they appear to be drinking Manhattan’s, I know that they took this responsibility seriously and discussed the merits of every entry at length. Based on the emails I received, this was pretty much the pattern from all my judges (the eval...