The fifth edition of the studio will emphasize critical thinking on basic architectural issues through the design proposal of a group of three houses for three very different families that will be sharing a single undivided lot in the east side of the city of Buffalo, New York – the City of Good Neighbors.

“Terra-Cotta Grotto” is a design intervention constructed with standard terracotta extrusions that explores the spatial, material, structural and ecological conditions of a grotto.

The study abroad program in Spain had students design a UB Cultural Campus in Madrid. Due to the site’s position on the threshold of the urban fabric and the natural landscape of the university district, students had to navigate and understand the social, cultural, and built context of the city. 

No. 2 (Number 2) is a series of model studies of objects to induce comfort of homeless individuals on the streets. The project used HDPE plastic bags, with the title based on the RIC (Resin Identification Code) of the material and, at the same time, the essence of recycling.

Frank Kraemer and Jelani Lowe drew from their experiences while studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. They were immediately drawn to the physical barriers that separate the public and private domains in Madrid. They investigated this duality by layering transparent planes, exploring how to use transparency as a link between public and private aspects of program, while simultaneously providing necessary privacy.

The work in Cages explores the qualities of material boundaries and enclosing conditions that relate structure and skin, establishing critical connections between the natural and the artificial in the material experience.

Across three volumes, this series of texts curated by UB assistant professor of architecture Miguel Guitart and Madrid architect Daniel Gimeno documents twenty texts and twenty visions, twenty teaching methods and twenty ways of designing. The collection of texts illumnates practicioners visions, teaching methods and ways of designing, and transports the reader to an intimate place which has inspired the works of some of the most outstanding architects of our time.

The project for the new Santa Maria Parish Center in Bonavista offers a specific solution to the needs of the program and the liturgy taking as a starting point two premises recurrent throughout the history of the Catholic Church: monumentality and mystery.