Good Neighbors

The Good Neighbors studio, co-taught by Miguel Guitart, assistant professor of architecture, and Michael Hoover, adjunct professor of architecture, was conducted for the sixth time in 2021. The studio serves as an introduction to architecture for students who are new to the discipline, making it an essential part of the School of Architecture and Planning’s 3.5-year Master of Architecture program.

The studio is specifically designed to introduce graduate-level students to the field of architecture. Students coming into this program come from backgrounds as diverse as music, math, nursing, business, environmental design, and many others. As the first of four studios in the 3.5-year program, Good Neighbors introduces students to many architectural concepts. The 3.5-year program has seen tremendous enrollment growth over the last year, increasing from eight students in Fall 2020 to 27 students in Fall 2021. These students brought a new critical mass and energy to the program at a time when students and professors alike were yearning for more personal connections. 

To better accommodate the large group, the teaching team opened the semester with a set of small projects that served as warm-up exercises to help students learn new architectural concepts and get to know one another. The exercises were arranged as a series of rotating group projects, creating opportunities for students to meet, talk and develop relationships. This strategy of meeting several new and different students is extremely important because it mimics the frequent studio changes that 
undergraduate students experience within their program. It is not until after the first two years of strategic educational development that students choose their path of research. The opportunities created within these foundational studios set the stage for successful student relationships over the course of the entire program.

After this series of warm-up exercises, students self-selected into pairs for the remainder of the semester to work on designing three domestic spaces and three corresponding, separate work studios for three hypothetical families. The families share ownership of a single large parcel on Buffalo’s East side, near the Summer-Best metro station, on a strip of land between Edna Place, Michigan Avenue and Best Street. The designed working studios, which are three of the six planned constructions on the site, will be semi-public to provide a potential for connection between the families and the greater community. 

The students explored concepts such as space, place, material and function in their designs, drawing from discussions about scale, geometry, movement, matter, light, structure, form, perception and emotion. The three hypothetical clients were presented with very detailed descriptions to help students craft unique spaces suited to each family’s needs within the equally allotted 2,500 square feet. These needs centered around one family’s musicality, another family’s artistry, and the third family’s interest in writing. Along with the planned community interaction through the work studios, students also explored landscaping strategies to create a welcoming outdoor space for neighbors to gather. The exterior design could not use fencing to delineate private from public space. The studio produced 14 unique design proposals for the families that would contribute to a greater sense of community and space-making on the site. 

Students
Sean Brunstein and Staci Tubiolo (Carving), Tina Tan and Melissa Kelley (Clusters), Omar Ibrahim and Hashem Badr (Pourous Boundaries), Christal Smith and Brian Moore (In Between)

Faculty
Miguel Guitart (coordinator), Michael Hoover

Term
ARC 501, Fall 2021

Program
3.5-Year MArch