Fall 2025 Technical Methods, Intellectual Domain Seminars and ARC Electives

It is encouraged, but not required,  that students register for the technical methods seminar and intellectual domain seminar that is in the same graduate research group as their research studio. For those students taking an option studio, design studio or are on the thesis track, students should consider topic of interest when registering for the seminars.

Students are only allowed to retake a seminar of the same number if the course content has significantly changed since last registration. Please reach out to the instructor of the course to confirm this is the case before registering. 

Technical Methods seminars explore strategies for conducting research in different focus areas of architecture, from visualization techniques, skill-building in the use of tools, and developing specific methods for technically-driven inquiry.

Sub-title: Logging 

This course will examine material origins and the ethics of material consumption as it pertains to wood construction. Wood has been one of the most popular building materials, alongside clay and stone, for thousands of years. As a natural material, it is the perfect expression of our intimate connection with the world in which we live. In fact, no other plant species is as dear to humanity as the tree. To that end, students will manually enact the process of how a tree, a perennial plant with an elongated stem, becomes a log, a part of the trunk of a tree that has fallen, and finally becomes timber, wood prepared for use in building or carpentry. Throughout this material transformation, we will examine and interrogate the three-fold definition of logger:

• a person who fells trees for timber; a lumberjack
• a device for making a systematic recording of events, observations, or measurements
• an agent of disturbance and change in an ecosystem

Utilizing this multi-faceted definition of logger, we will directly engage with the material culture of the forest industry, which most, if not all of the technological innovations surrounding this industry have been attempts to standardize and homogeneous the material. That is, to kill the plant so it will behave and perform in a predictable and consistent manner – to strip it of its ‘wood-ness’. As a counterpoint to this historical trend, the course will aim to embrace the living, unpredictable, and irregular features inherent to all trees and graphic experiments will attempt to capitalize on these bizarre and eccentric qualities. Through deep experiential and hands-on learning, this course will attempt to rekindle the omnipresent relationship between people and wood. 

Course contact hours will occur both on-campus (20%) and-off campus (80%) throughout the semester. Weekly discussions, field visits, material harvesting, and student presentations will involve spending time outdoors in parks, preserves, conservation zones, and state forests while interacting with ecologists, conservationists, loggers, foresters, and industry professionals. Hands-on exercises in our Fabrication Workshop(s) exploring log milling will supplement weekly readings, short-story writings, and graphic production.

Sub-title: Residential Weatherization

To address the climate crisis, New York State plans to reduce statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050. Unfortunately, recent estimates from the federal government show that GHGs continue to increase in the residential sector. This is especially poignant for the houses of Buffalo, estimated by the Census to have the oldest housing stock in the United States.

To learn how to reduce GHGs from residential buildings, this class will delve into the fundamentals of residential weatherization and energy auditing. Concepts to be discussed include the house as a system, typical building assemblies, and mechanical systems. This class will follow a flipped classroom format where students will spend most of their time in class dedicated to hands on activities to reinforce concepts learned outside of class. These activities include using energy auditing tools, performing a blower door test, and using thermal imaging cameras, necessary skills to learn how to identify and address problems in a house such as energy consumption, air leakage, and moisture control issues.

 This class is linked with the Ecological Practices studio taught by Nicholas Rajkovich. Therefore a number of students in the Ecological Practices Studio will be force registered into this class. However, a limited number fo seats will be open to students taking additional studios. Support for this class comes from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) under PON 3981: Energy Efficiency and Clean Technology Training.

Sub-title: AI and Architectural Thinking

This course, developed with support from the SUNY Academic Innovation Grants Program, introduces students to the foundational concepts of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its growing influence on architectural design workflows. Students will critically examine AI's potential roles—as actor, material, and provocateur—while gaining hands-on experience with AI tools for design argumentation, analysis, and generation. Through case studies, debates, and guided exercises, the seminar explores how AI can support the development of design arguments, foster precedent-based innovation, and improve design solutions. Importantly, the course will also highlight key ethical considerations such as authorship, bias, and the risk of cognitive dependency. Using a mixed-methods pedagogical framework, students will document their cognitive and creative processes, reflecting on how AI integration transforms their design thinking.

This seminar will serve as a conceptual and technical foundation for a design studio offered in Spring 2026, where students will apply the knowledge and methods developed in the seminar to real-world design problems. The studio will focus on AI-assisted iterative design, with students using GenAI tools in tandem with parametric modeling and performance assessment strategies to address spatial, environmental, and structural challenges. Together, the seminar and studio form a coordinated curriculum that bridges critical inquiry with computational proficiency, offering students a comprehensive and ethically grounded education in AI-augmented architectural design.

Sub-title: Elements of Urban Design

Urban design is distinctly different from architecture, as it takes place over a longer time frame, with less clearly defined goals, and impacting a far broader audience than just the client. The architectural blueprint has no equal in urban design, as the master plan is largely a relic of the past. Instead, urban designers have a host of tools and skills at their disposal to improve the physical environment through research, vision, guidance, and influence. This course will introduce these tools and skills, taking you on an excursion to the multifaceted processes that shape our cities. You will start the semester as an observer of the elements that make up our cities, from buildings and blocks to streets and public spaces. We then discuss the various roles and tools that urban designers have at their disposal, before deploying these tools to design a real-world setting in Buffalo.

Sub-title: Machine Production: Digitally Fabricated Assemblies

Investigate the role digital fabrication plays in architectural assemblies and why tools such as 3D printers, CNC routers, waterjet cutters and robotic arms are becoming increasingly prominent in the industry.

Through engaging our workshop's advanced machinery, we will focus on efficient processes, material mindfulness and machine workflows. Together we will weigh the variables of design and production in pre-fab assembly systems.

Students will receive training in programming and machine operation to complete a digitally fabricated assembly, acting as designer, operator and fabricator, gaining firsthand experience on our advanced machines. 

Sub-title: Hidden [Hi]Stories. Hearing Silences

This graduate-level seminar explores the application of inclusive design goals in the built environment, with a focus on housing, transportation facilities, and wayfinding. Emphasizing inclusive, user-centered approaches, the seminar informs students how to obtain and translate technical concepts into user-friendly guidelines for use by professionals who wish to design inclusive environments that better support diverse users—including people with mobility and sensory disabilities, people who are blind or visually impaired, older adults, and neurodivergent populations, among others.

Students will be introduced to a range of standards and best practices related to accessibility and inclusive design in housing, transit facilities, and wayfinding. In addition to developing a working knowledge of these standards, students will learn how to evaluate physical environments for compliance and usability, and explore effective measurement and documentation techniques. The course goes beyond technical knowledge to emphasize the importance of evidence-based design thinking in creating environments that work well for everyone.

A key component of the seminar is the translation of technical guidance into clear, visually compelling resources that can be easily understood and applied by design professionals. Students will be assigned specific topics within housing, transportation, and wayfinding; conduct focused research; and present case studies and current best practices. These findings will be synthesized into concise, illustrated guidelines intended to inform real-world design and planning efforts.

By the end of the course, students will have developed a set of graphic and written design resources that demonstrate their ability to communicate accessibility and inclusive design solutions effectively. The goal is to enhance students’ knowledge of regulatory requirements, improve their skillset on graphic illustrations and written design standards, and provide a deeper understanding of key design solutions that make environments more inclusive, navigable, and equitable for all users.

Students enrolled in the Inclusive Design Studio, “Inclusive Housing for Transit-Oriented Communities,” are highly encouraged to enroll.

Intellectual Domain seminars explore the theoretical and historical knowledge-bases of various focus areas of architecture, with an emphasis on pursuing intellectual inquiry.

Sub-Title: Designing Inclusive Environments

This seminar offers an in-depth introduction to inclusive design—a practice that centers the needs, perspectives, and lived experiences of diverse users in the design process. Challenging traditional designer-centric approaches, inclusive design promotes social responsibility by prioritizing equity, accessibility, and usability in the creation of products, buildings, and communities. Emphasizing a shift from form-driven aesthetics to function-driven outcomes, the course explores how inclusive design enhances the responsiveness and utility of the built environment for a broader spectrum of people.
Students will engage with core principles and knowledge bases of inclusive design, learn the foundations of evidence-based practice, and develop critical skills in evaluation and analysis. Case studies and best-practice examples will illustrate the real-world application of these methods.

Sub-Title: Fabricating the Real 

This seminar introduces theoretical and historical topics relevant for research in the design of Situated Technologies. Current research investigates artificial intelligence and mixed-reality technologies, and their application within architecture and construction. Surveying the cultural history of VR, AR, MR and the emergence of tools for generating synthetic media through large language models and diffusion models, the course focuses on the ontological and epistemological implications of these technologies with regard to conceptions of “the real.” Students develop short films of design fiction scenarios for near-future technologies enabling hybrid virtual-actual spatial interactions.

Course description pending. 

Sub-Title: Using Evidence-Based Precedents in Practice for Architecture, Planning, and Real Estate Development.

The final structure and conduct of the course will be a negotiation among course participants based on our review of the following general description, the specifics of the syllabus, and the skill level of the class participants.

This course equips students with the tools to navigate the intricate world of urban placemaking and design. It draws on the practical wisdom of Don Schon’s “Reflective Practice,” the problem-solving insights of Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s concept of “wicked problems,” and the historic and contemporary theories of urban design and placemaking.  The course will critically assess real-world, award-winning urban interventions recognized by the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence from 1986 through 2019. These 88 projects, spanning 36 states, serve as invaluable precedents for similar circumstances in contemporary projects. Students will delve into the literature of precedents across various disciplines, explore storytelling and graphic representation approaches, and learn how to contextualize precedents in practice, situating them in new places.  Students will explore sites of interest in our region through comparative precedent cases to explore how to situate general knowledge in specific contexts.

Student learning outcomes include using graphic representations to illustrate:

1. The Aims of Practice. The ability to clarify practice aims, focusing on the quality of relationships between people and place and the relations among people in place as fundamental goals.

2. Opening the Dialogic Space. The ability to open dialogue about the full potential of urban projects

• By identifying relevant precedents, students can initiate dialogue with clients, stakeholders, and the impacted public about the project and the project development process. This enhances their understanding and empowers them to contribute to the urban development discourse.
• Capturing and communicating knowledge gained from a project from   “somewhere else” and situating it in a new context with different local knowledge, geographies, climates, economics, constituencies, histories, political regimes, and cultures.
• Drawing on precedents and other facts on the ground, and deriving who should be included or excluded from having a voice in the process.

3. Confirmation and Interrogation (Critical Thinking). The ability to confirm and interrogate the expressions of client and stakeholder intentions.

• Presenting precedents with critical assessments
•  Aligning the precedents with current project circumstances.
• The ability to employ additional methods (graphics, proposal review, storytelling, etc.) to explore potential futures for the project site.

4. Framing Action. The ability to frame actions for consideration by the clients, stakeholders, and others impacted by the projects.

Sub-title: Material Matters

This seminar focuses upon the tectonic, the convergence of poetry and technique in architecture.  The course explores innovative uses of materials through the examination of a series of contemporary buildings by distinguished international architects.  It seeks to develop an understanding of how technical decisions in the deployment of materials, construction systems and details can be directed towards conceptual and cultural ends. 

This exploration of making and meaning is pursued through studies of buildings that demonstrate a strong relationship between concept and construct together with a high level of integration of architectural, structural, services and enclosure systems. These studies examine ways in which digital design, production techniques and sustainability are changing the understanding of material optimization and producing new concepts of order. 

The seminar is organized as a series of discussions focusing on case studies of built projects.  These conversations revolve around readings, lectures and student presentations. Students will research buildings and demonstrate through the making of detailed analytical drawings and physical models their understanding of both the conceptual basis of the project’s design and its execution in built form.  

Note: This course was previously taught with the course number ARC 549. Students have previously taken ARC 549 are not allowed to retake this seminar for graduate credit. 

Any 500 level or higher graduate course at UB may count as an elective in the M.Arch program. If a student wishes to take a course outside of the Department of Architecture, they must work with the department offering the course to register. The courses below are those offered by the Department of Architecture. Note that these courses may have limited seats if they are dual listed with an undergraduate section.

Students who take additional techincal methods and intellectual domain seminars to what is required can use these courses as electives. 

This course will be taught as two parallel narratives regarding Global Practices in Design. The first narrative will be a class by class overview of important movements in art, architecture and design over the past century. Key movements will be examined in relationship to the social, political and economic factors which either played a role in its formation or which was reacted against. The intent of this approach to instruction is to provide students with a framework by which to recognize the societal forces which have an impact on the production of art, architecture and design.

The second narrative of the course will survey small, cutting-edge architecture firms across the globe. We will begin with a review of the theory of 'critical regionalism' proposed by Kenneth Frampton in the 1980's and follow that up with several readings that reinforce and/or question the validity of this theory. Students will then focus on the work of architects and artists working in different countries across the globe. The intent of the course is to facilitate students understanding of the design process used by various architects and to critically examine the relationship of this design process to the particular social, political and cultural milieu of the region in which each architect is generating the work.​

Sub-title: CommunIty–based Light Rail Infrastructure + Speculative Design proposals

We will design groovy Rail Stations for three potential Light Rail Rapid Transit (LRRT) Lines in conjunction with Citizens for Regional Transit (CRT): the historic Belt Line, the Kensington Line, and CRT’s Airport Corridor. We will map the proposed Lines, building on the work of last semester, and meet with community members and government officials to discuss routes and feasibility.

The semester will start by walking the Belt Line. We will then design new Stations, most likely in Larkinville and other key nodes in the City. 

This seminar will examine options for career development in architecture and design. We will recognize traditional design based careers, but focus on developing a wider scope of career development for the built environment, explore pathways and build networks for early career growth and other opportunities.  We will examine the role of the architect in relation to traditional private clients as well as not-for profits, granting agencies, educational institutions, and other public organizations.  We will investigate how the practice of architecture can respond to our current economic, ecological, and political climates.  We will welcome a range of guest speakers, analyze readings, and share perspectives through discussion. Students will also develop conceptual career roadmaps and/or business models.

ARC 584 does not substitute for ARC 582 (Professional Practice) which is required for all students in the M.Arch program. 

This course prepares graduate students in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, historic preservation, planning, and allied fields to design and conduct original research across historical, contemporary, and speculative futures of the built environment. Through lectures, readings, writing exercises, discussions, and peer workshops, students learn to connect theoretical frameworks with research design—shaping questions, selecting methods, analyzing data, and crafting rigorous arguments. Emphasis is placed on transforming design questions into actionable research agendas, communicating findings that shape design discourse, and integrating diverse data sources to inform innovative, resilient, and equitable design practice.