The fellowship honors the legacy of Peter Reyner Banham, who taught at UB from 1976-80 and produced a foundational body of scholarship on material/visual culture as a reflection of contemporary social life. Banham spent his time in Buffalo engaged in a scholarly project on the imaginary of American industrial architecture at work in early modernism that took the form of historical research, hands-on engagement and seminar instruction, resulting in his landmark work, A Concrete Atlantis.

In celebration of Banham's legacy of experimental criticism, this fellowship supports the research and creative activity of emerging practitioners. Over the course of a year, fellows teach, deliver a public lecture and prepare an exhibition culminating from their research and creative work at the school.

Nicolas Barrette has spent more than a decade building a career in architecture, specializing in projects involving adaptive reuse, heritage transformation, climate-responsive design, and the economic and material systems that shape the built environment. As 2026-27 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow, he plans to combine his architectural expertise with his longstanding interest in technology to explore the topic of data centers, AI, and the architecture of anticipated vacancy in Buffalo.

Today, data centers are being constructed at a massive scale despite the likelihood of rapid obsolescence. Conjuring parallels to Buffalo’s grain elevators, Nic’s work will explore what happens to the infrastructures being built today once they too, inevitably, become artifacts. He plans for the work to culminate in a publication reframing the cloud as a territorial and design problem with three main goals achieved along the way: establish an architectural history of the data center in North America, apply architectural representational and mapping tools, and address the question of data center afterlives.