Matt Burgermaster received two Honor Awards in AIA New Jersey’s 2023 Design Competition for recent projects by his office MABU in the built and unbuilt categories – DOUBLE TAKE and FOODLAB. To see the full list of winners, please visit the AIA’s official website.

DOUBLE TAKE is an adaptive reuse of a non-descript machine shop into a small warehouse complex with an integrated series of enclosed gardens and flexible work yards. Located along a commercial strip in suburban New Jersey, the project emerges from, and interacts with, an everyday situation in which architecture appears to be conspicuously absent. This building does not try to explain itself or put on a big show. Rather than a didactic aesthetic disposition towards adaptive reuse, it seeks to engender a particular kind of attention – a “double take”.

FOODLAB is a small culinary workspace and greenhouse set within a forest clearing in upstate New York. The new building is an elemental structure that provides a temporary space for creative experimentation with food amidst this landscape’s regenerative process of ecological succession. Inspired by the Japanese concept of a doma (meaning “a dirt place”), the building has a minimal footprint, a permeable boundary between inside and outside, and is designed for disassembly. It is constructed of recycled components from an off-the-shelf building kit. This is a second-hand architecture that aims to leave no trace behind. SoA alum Ziyuan (Sam) Wu, Class of 2023, is on the MABU project team.