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.
Subtitle: Time and Material
Working directly with materials, spaces, and tools, this course opens up a time-based inquiry into preservation, construction, and re-reconstruction. Through hands-on experience—including on-site recording and full-scale making—we will explore a dialogic approach between matter and maker, considering materials not as passive tools but as active agents in shaping our environment and how we relate to it. With a base at The Assembly House, Maher’s ‘dreamworld for the building arts’ and center for construction/design education, we will engage with historical building fragments as we interpret their past and imagine their potential futures. The surrounding city will provide a larger context for inquiry, reflection, and response.
**Basic shop experience is required for this course.
Subtitle: Climate and data sensemaking
The climate emergency is revealed through data. The canonical “hockey stick” graphic correlated rising atmospheric carbon levels to global temperatures and exposed a phenomenon imperceptible to many. And thus climate is often attended to quantitatively. The Paris agreement established specific national emission-reduction pledges. In the US, states set carbon reduction targets (e.g. 85% reduction by 2050 from 1990 levels in NY state), and municipalities follow suit (e.g. 75% reduction from 2005 by 2050 in Erie County). UB’s decarbonization plans describe energy flow with Sankey charts precise to the kWh (e.g. 37097435.9 kWh of purchased electricity used in South Campus buildings). Design of individual buildings invokes simulation, benchmarking, and dashboard of energy and carbon performance.
Our perceptions of the climate crisis are saturated with quantifiable data. However, overemphasizing quantification obscures our understanding of the narrative or tangible aspects of climate change. It is a stretch to grapple simultaneously with the abstract (tons of carbon) and the physical (tons of concrete), but numbers, stories and materiality are all essential when designing spaces. So: How might we make more sense of numbers during design? How might data be more deeply understood through processes of making? How might we engage the dialectic of quantity and quality?
This class will reckon with the ever-widening domains of quantitative data related to the climate emergency in architecture, and stake out a position on how these can be interpreted by and through design interventions. This course will draw from ideas of data humanism, data visualization, data physicalization, space as pedagogy, and eschew “data-driven” design and quantitative optimization. The work will contend with notions of magnitude/scale, precision, accuracy, data sourcing, epistemology and the quantitative as it pursues questions of impact, sensation, narrative, unmeasurables, and the qualitative.
The class will produce some sort of collectively defined prototype(s) or installation(s) to interrogate the data underlying the relationships of designers to climate in an era of radical change.
Subtitle: Toward Multispecies Kinship
How might designers learn from the living and built environment in engaged and even empathic ways? Drawing from Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this seminar will explore strategies of visualizing ecologies through multispecies kinship and collaboration. Central to the course will be a series of exercises in conducting hands-on field research. Together we will explore ways of introducing interdisciplinary methods – including biology, field ecology and anthropology – into processes of documenting, mapping, and drawing ‘sites’ for potential co-design. Through these explorations, we will ask: How might we better understand our expanded communities of more-than-human kin through visual representation, and how might this process lay the groundwork to advocate for the environment and ecological action?
Practical and logistical note: The projects in this seminar will contribute to ongoing research that may result in the eventual development of commissioned architectural work, for which students would be credited appropriately. Students enrolled in this course would be expected to participate in on-site fieldwork in various locations. It is recommended that students have access to cars, or have the ability to drive a car. While most of our anticipated field trips would be regional (up to 1.5 hour drive), there may be a possibility of a longer field trip, which would be subsidized (in the event that it takes place). Please email Joyce with any questions.
Course description pending.
This course is closely linked with the Fall 2026 Option Studio taught by Greg Delaney. Therefore, registration will be closed until after studio registration takes place. Those in the Option studio will then be contacted regarding registration for this course.
Subtitle: Architectural Geometry and Construction
This technical seminar introduces foundational concepts in computational modeling and simulation, emphasizing how geometric principles shape the design-to-construction process. Focusing on lightweight shell structures, students will develop a design-to-production digital workflow inspired by built case studies that illustrate the connection between digital form-finding and physical fabrication, exploring how digital models adapt to material behavior and manufacturing constraints.
The relationship between technology and architecture continues to influence how we design and construct buildings today. Thanks to easier access to digital tools and modern fabrication equipment, designers can experiment with new materials, structures, and methods of making. To stay responsive to a rapidly changing world, architectural research must find creative ways to connect design thinking with emerging technologies. Skills in computational design are highly adaptable to both well-established and emerging sectors of architectural practice.
Students will gain hands-on experience in production-aware digital practices, form optimization, and design-to-fabrication modeling techniques. Class time is often hands-on, introducing algorithmic modeling in Grasshopper / Rhino, physics-based simulation in Kangaroo2 and other selected plug-ins that enhance Grasshopper’s functionality, including parametric robot control for assembly and fabrication.
Subtitle: Manufactured Housing Weatherization
Across New York State, manufactured homes are a vital source of affordable housing—but they are also among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Many were built before energy codes, leaving residents exposed to extreme heat, cold, and moisture while struggling with high energy costs. As New York State aims to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improving the energy performance of manufactured housing will be essential—not only to meet climate goals, but to ensure health, comfort, and equity for residents in every corner of the state.
This class explores the fundamentals of residential weatherization and energy auditing with a focus on manufactured housing. Students will learn how to see a house as a system—understanding how air, heat, and moisture move through typical manufactured home assemblies and mechanical systems. Through hands-on, field-based learning using the Solar Decathlon house on North Campus as a subject, students will gain experience with energy auditing tools, blower door tests, and thermal imaging cameras to diagnose and address issues such as air leakage, insulation gaps, and moisture control.
Delivered in a flipped-classroom format, this course emphasizes applied learning. 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.
This course is closely linked with the Inclusive Design Graduate Research Group Studio taught by Nicholas Rajkovich. Therefore, registration will be closed until after studio registration takes place. Those in the ID studio will then be contacted regarding registration for this course.
Please note: this class does not prepare students to take the Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC) exam.
Subtitle: Hidden [Hi]stories. Hearing Silences
This seminar involves a graduate workshop that will take place in Zurich, Switzerland over spring break. The workshop delves into understanding of often-unacknowledged narratives, omissions, and gaps within architectural history and theory. Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will critically explore the production of architectural knowedge and construction of historical narratives. Using readings, discussions and creative assignments, participants will interrogate the complexities of historical representation and the implications of overlooked histories with the built environment, while interrogating how inequities based on wealth, race, gender and physical ability intersect to written history. With a focus on gender and sexuality, the course emphasizes understanding epistemicide, archival gaps and the role of power and ideology in shaping architectural history. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to employ ficto-critical approaches in the development of the contents of a final assignment.
This course will be forced registration only. Students interested should complete the form that was sent via email by Stacey Komendat. Please contact her at staceyga@buffalo.edu with questions.
Subtitle: Multispecies Design and the City
Contrary to the commonly held belief that cities are agents of ecological degradation, recent research has found that urban areas are surprising refuges for biodiversity. These urban environments, evolving more rapidly than their rural counterparts, have become hubs of evolution where species quickly adapt to new environments, forming complex and dynamic ecosystems. However, despite this flourishing urban biodiversity, this remains largely ignored in traditional approaches to architecture, urban design, and planning, which have typically focused on accommodating human needs while neglecting the diverse communities of species that also inhabit the city.
This seminar investigates theories of multispecies design and interspecies interaction through the development of design criteria for (and with) nonhuman urban inhabitants. We will examine the design of spaces that not only accommodate but also engage both human and nonhuman urban life. Students will collectively research and develop a “field guide” that presents design criteria for more than human urban environments. Readings spanning the fields of philosophy, anthropology, science and technology studies, animal studies, environmental humanities and art provide a transdisciplinary context within which these criteria will be considered. This seminar fosters critical thinking, ecological literacy, and the ability to synthesize scientific research into design applications. Co-registration with the spring 2026 Situated Technologies Design Research Studio is highly recommended but not required.
Sub-Title: Design for Resilient Environments
Middle Landscapes: Housing, Streets and Urban Climate
Streets are often treated as networks of engineered surfaces for movement, utilities, and traffic, while houses are framed through styles, regulations, or typologies. In both visions, technological choice appears as a neutral means through which aesthetic or infrastructural aims are realized. This seminar approaches them differently. We study middle landscapes—the ecological environments formed by yards, setbacks, sidewalks, vegetation, ground conditions, façades, and patterns of occupation that link streets and buildings—as sites where relations between nature and society are expressed through material and technological decisions.
To understand how these linked environments take shape and respond to climate stress, the seminar draws from environmental humanities and science and technology studies (STS). To observe how housing and street ecologies interact in practice, we partner with BEVL, the Hot Streets studio, and the DRE Lab’s Refugee Housing Study to document how heat, airflow, materials, and everyday adaptations circulate across the street–house threshold in Buffalo’s Broadway–Fillmore neighborhood.
A final Atlas of Housing–Street Situations will synthesize these findings and propose scenarios for transitioning heat-vulnerable thresholds into more resilient and equitable environments across New York State.
This course is open to architecture and urban planning students in and outside of the Hot Streets studio.
Course description pending.
Subtitle: Placemaking and placekeeping
Place and placemaking are hotly debated topics among architects, urban designers, planners, and policy makers. But what is this rather abstract notion of ‘place’? What is placemaking, and why is it so central to many professional and academic discussions? Who are ‘placemakers’? Are we?
This course demonstrates that ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ is all around us, and that a wide range of visions on place have greatly influenced our everyday environment. Through reading, discussing, analyzing, and making places, students learn how places shape us and how we shape places. A two-part approach first introduces place as a social, cultural, and psychological construct. In the second part of the course, students are introduced to the active profession and discourse of placemaking. They learn that so-called ‘placemakers’ are not just the usual suspects – although architects, urban planners and designers have certainly left their mark on the urban environment. Instead, they discover a wide range of artists, activitists, citizens, and governments that each have their own definition of place and making place.
This course introduces and explores the concepts and conceptions of place, placemaking, and placekeeping through a mixture of lectures, discussions, analyses, and placemaking exercises. As an intellectual domain seminar, students read, watch, and discuss texts, documentaries and films on place, placemaking, and placekeeping. But the course goes further than abstract observation and critique. To truly learn about defining, making, and keeping place, students also read and discuss Buffalo, a treasure trove of American visions of place.
Subtitle: Materials + Mortals
“ We are born, work, love and die in architecture”
This seminar will look beyond facades to examine notable buildings from around the world, trace the clients, track designers and note the nature and contributions of builders.
Focused on a series of readings and close examinations of a range of different building types and significant landmarks it will engage students in the scrutiny of materials and examinations of people in social settings from across history.
This seminar will examine the work of 20th century and contemporary architects and engineers who are closely engaged with the art of construction. Instead of seeing themselves simply as designers who gladly surrender technical decisions to consultants, these architects and engineers strive to forge strong links between concept and construct. The material systems, buildings and structures that result from this focus on integrated design explore new conceptual and technical territories that expand the boundaries of architecture and engineering.
In this seminar, undergraduate and graduate students study architectural education and its recent history, as well as its implementation at K-12 levels. The seminar begins with readings, discussions, and planning sessions that introduce the basics of lesson planning and design curriculum development. Subsequently, each student will have a teaching experience in which they partner with a local architect, a primary, middle, or high school teacher, and the seminar instructor. The team will design and implement a project with students in the Buffalo Public Schools. Students will work as team members of the Architecture + Education program, an award winning, innovative collaboration between local architects and educators utilizing architecture and design to teach students mathematics, science, history, social studies, art and technology within the New York State public school curriculum. Student work from the program will be exhibited at a local gallery in spring/summer 2026.
This course offering addresses two of UB’s Department of Architecture goals: 1) to promote diversity in the discipline, and 2) to give our students an opportunity to work closely with local professionals.
Architecture + Education is a project of the Buffalo Architecture Foundation, Inc. (BAF), which is supported by the American Institute of Architects Buffalo/Western New York Chapter. BAF is a not-for-profit, public charity dedicated to inspiring the exploration and appreciation of architecture and how it shapes our lives.
This course examines contemporary East Asian architecture and urbanism through the lens of Korea, focusing on the country’s cultural production—rooted in regional traditions yet functioning as a form of global soft power. Korea’s rapid modernization, initially introduced by the West but creatively reinterpreted, has produced a distinctive modernism that fuses tradition, innovation, and global engagement. The course positions Korea as a narrative producer continually reinventing itself through globalization and technological change. Drawing on media, literature, popular music, architecture, and urban life, students will analyze cultural projects that reveal the tension between local specificity and global resonance. Case studies in Korea will be placed in dialogue with comparative perspectives from Japan and China. We will explore ten key topics (keywords) to unpack diverse cultural phenomena in East Asia: Time, DMZ, White, Joinery, Apartment, Madang, Temple, Renovation, Façade, and Bang. Using these as conceptual frameworks, students will critically investigate themes of their own interest and concern—such as K-pop, the film Parasite, the works of Han Kang, BTS, K-Pop: Demon Hunters, K-cosmetics, or webtoons—to develop a final project in one of the following forms: an essay, white paper, short story (creative writing), drawing or painting, design or product proposal, or news article. Through these explorations, the course encourages reflection on how stories emerging from Korea illuminate the social, cultural, and spatial dynamics of contemporary global cities
Note that this course will be taught in a hybrid format (online synchronous lectures and one or two in-person presentation meetings).
Subtitle: Memorializing Difficult Histories: Architecture, Preservation, and Embodied Experiences
This course focuses on how to learn, represent, and memorialize difficult histories in the built environment, referring to scholarship on the memory of traumatic man-made events such as transatlantic slavery, the genocide of Indigenous populations in the Americas, Jim Crow and segregation, the Holocaust, structural racism, mass shootings, and resurgent antisemitism, among others.
In this course, students will leverage their perspectives as architects, planners, and preservationists in order to understand and interpret history. The goal of the course is twofold: one, to learn historical narratives critically; two, to debate ideas for memorials and other markers of history. While this is not a studio course, it will include a creative and generative component alongside the study of history and the discussion of theory.
While readings and examples will be drawn from different parts of the world, the course pays special attention to Buffalo, a city marked by a long history and ongoing present of structural and overt racism, as well as other traumas ranging from Indigenous dispossession to deindustrialization.
The ethical motivation for this course is a broad understanding of social justice that considers narratives, social representations, and cultural imaginaries as operative in relations of inequality and emancipation. Telling histories of oppression through memorials and preservation is not merely a way to register injustice, but also a means to effecting social change towards justice.
Subtitle: From Trash to Time Travelers: Storytelling Through Discarded Building Materials
Making buildings is a process that inherently consumes and wastes large amounts of material resources. It remains a materially-wasteful endeavor because we don’t perceive buildings as they really are: temporary assemblies of objects that had to move to get to the construction site and will inevitably move again at the end of a building’s life. If we could perceive and feel the events of an object's past (extraction, processing, construction) and its possible future states (demolition, downcycling, reuse, or landfill), would we construct and demolish buildings as thoughtlessly as we do now? Or would we take more care in where those objects are sourced and where they go after?
Stories are a device for moving through time, for exploring past and future realities, for transporting us to worlds or points of view that differ from our lived experience. Stories can make the externalities of objects perceptible to us, and transform them in our imaginations from static objects to Objectiles: object-projectiles on a trajectory through space and time.
In this seminar, we will learn how to construct compelling narratives by reading graphic novels, playing narrative-based digital games, and analyzing other interactive media. Students will test out various storytelling techniques and mediums through mini projects, blending fictional speculation with factual research about material life cycles, and develop a final project about one Objectile. The challenge will be to tell a story that untangles the larger networks that the Objectile is entangled in, and expand empathy to other entities that our Objectile-protagonist encounters on its journey.
This course is designed to develop a basis for a research project of your choice (final thesis project, grant application, policy document, independent research project, etc.). You will explore different research methods, theoretical references, and ways to plan your work. You will also dive into your topic and hone your main ideas. The course relies on readings, writing exercises, in-class workshops, instructor and guest presentations, discussions, and peer review. By the end of the semester, you will have developed a thesis and/or research project prospectus, with a roadmap tailored to your work and interests.
This course is an introduction to parametric and algorithmic design in Building Information Modeling (BIM). We will explore how drawing, modeling, and form-finding in architectural representation can be informed by parameters, data, and information. Students will also develop methods to both extract and produce quantitative and qualitative “information”. Students will be exposed to modeling and drawing techniques at various scales that range from zoning and conceptual massing studies and schedules to drawings and models of detailed architectural assemblies. We will also document design development through drawing sets that span between overall plan and section drawings to building section details that parallels the professional work environment. Throughout the process, we will challenge and critique notions of efficiency and automation embedded within the BIM design paradigm.
In this course, we will explore standards of building construction through BIM tools and investigate the in/visibilities of labor embedded within architectural practice through drawing and modeling building assemblies, examining specifications and completing construction documents.
For more specific information on courses including scheduled times, days, modality and restrictions, please see the class schedule.