Dean's Welcome
Welcome to The School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo—a rich multidisciplinary environment of creative, talented, and intelligent people who discuss provocative ideas, do meaningful work, and collectively advance timely projects that interface with the complex social and environmental issues of the 21st century.
With professional and pre-professional programs in the design and planning fields, we offer a world-class education that moves between knowledge in the arts, the humanities, and the STEM disciplines that enables our students to think critically, design creatively, problem solve collaboratively, and communicate verbally and visually. In the only school of architecture and planning within the 64-campus State University of New York system, we shape students to be model citizens, future leaders, and agents of change.
The School of Architecture and Planning—situated within a flagship university of the State University of New York and one of the nation's leading public research universities—is a different kind of school with an incredible legacy of and commitment to creative making and engaged learning. Our outstanding and passionate faculty pursue a range of research interests—including climate resilience and adaptation, innovative fabrication and assembly, sustainable building envelopes, inclusive design, community development and equitable practices—through the techniques and technologies of our disciplines.
Dean Julia Czerniak shares leadership vision in Architect's Newspaper Q&A
"I see a deanship as a leadership position with a disciplinary project that engages, inspires, supports, and advocates for the school, university and city...I want to build a school of creative, talented, and intelligent people who discuss provocative ideas, do meaningful work, and collectively advance timely and serious projects to not only show what we as architects and planners can do, but also how we, in the context of deindustrializing Buffalo, can get things done. In other words, by building both relationships and projects."
- Dean Julia Czerniak (read full Q&A in Architect's Newspaper)
Through a combination of innovative pedagogies and state-of-the art facilities, our students learn by doing in a city and region with a rich legacy and culture of architecture, landscape and planning that spans centuries, from design work by Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frederick Law Olmsted to, more recently, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Toshiko Mori, and Walter Hood. In this way we are committed to the design and planning disciplines as both spatial and material practices and intellectual projects, all of which prepare students to be the next generation of architects, planners, designers, scholars, and public servants that advance visions for an equitable, diverse, culturally rich world and low carbon planet.
Architectural and planning educations are grounded in hope. Join us as we reimagine and reposition our disciplines and professions to confront contemporary challenges in our rapidly changing, globalized world.
Julia E. Czerniak
Dean and Professor
School of Architecture and Planning
University at Buffalo
View Dean Julia Czerniak's full profile