Please review the video, presentations and studio descriptions and then complete the preference form. Student preference will be taken into account when making studio assignments. However, students are not guaranteed any specific studio.
Before completing this form, please be sure that you do not have a hold on your account. If you have a hold on your account, work to remove the hold before the survey submission deadline. Students who are currently registered for more than 13 credits cannot be registered for studio due to the maximum credit limit policy (19 credits). So please drop to 13 credits or less. Failure to do this or remove a hold may lead to lower studio priority.
The deadline to submit this form is Monday, December 1.
If you have any questions on this process, please contact Stacey Komendat at staceyga@buffalo.edu.
The Objectile Advocacy Office
The studio is about designing, building, and telling stories with reused building materials. Not only because reuse is environmentally necessary but because reused materials have a story to tell us - about the building they used to be in, what they were used for, the people they encountered, and the events they witnessed. We will design these materials in ways that allow us to see the traces of their past life - either through markings, misuse, or other physical qualities. The objective is to transform what we think of as “trash”, which has no value, into valuable “Objectiles”: object-projectiles that are on a trajectory through space and time, collecting stories.
Our studio space in Parker 24 will become the Objectile Advocacy Office: a place to collect, document, and design with Objectiles at 1-to-1 scale. In the first project, each student will make a small, furniture-scale piece with found objects. In the second project, we will move on to building larger-scale building fragments to re-imagine common architectural elements such as “wall”, “stair”, “floor”, and “column” through the lens of found objects. These seemingly banal and neutral elements will invite a new form of engagement, through the idiosyncratic nature of the Objectiles. In both of these projects, the friction between what an object used to be and what it wants to become next is the starting point of design.
Our process will alternate between collecting, designing, representing, and building with Objectiles. We will visit reuse centers like Reuse Action and engage with guest critics who are currently working at the forefront of reuse in architecture at offices like Rotor in Brussels and Bellastock in Paris. We will also experiment with time-based representation, such as animations, choreography, and graphic novels, which are necessary to represent the non-static quality of Objectiles.
Hot Street Futures: Designing Climate-Responsive Corridors in New York
Instructors: Kristine Stiphany, PhD, AIA & Jorge Ituarte Arreola
Spring 2026
The challenge
Extreme heat is now one of the most serious and unevenly felt climate risks in New York’s small and mid-sized cities. Many of these streets—once shaped by rail lines, main streets, and older neighborhood patterns—now record some of the highest temperatures in the state. Years of disinvestment, wider roads built for cars, declining tree canopy, and fragmented ecological systems have created corridors that trap and radiate heat throughout the day and night. This strain lands hardest on communities already managing economic and social pressures. Recent summers show that this is no longer an occasional problem but a structural one—affecting comfort, health, mobility, and the long-term durability of urban infrastructure.
The studio
This studio uses scenario planning to re-envision how climate-responsive streetscapes can reduce heat exposure, support public health, and strengthen the corridors that structure daily life. Grounded in emerging conversations on urban ecologies and poly-ecological systems, the studio treats streets as multi-scalar environments where climate, materials, vegetation, and everyday social activity intersect. Focusing on corridors where extreme heat and socioeconomic vulnerability collide in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, sponsored travel and a collaboration with the Building Environmental Visualization Lab (BEVL) will support students in analyzing how built form, settlement patterns, and ecological systems shape microclimates and urban resilience across different city types.
Students will:
1. Conduct on-site microclimate sensing—including shade, surface temperature, airflow, materials, and vegetation—across high-risk corridors during New York’s varying climate conditions.
2. Translate observed data into a typology of poly-ecological street systems, using transects and middle-landscape analysis to understand how streets function between buildings and larger urban systems.
3. Use BEVL simulations to evaluate solar exposure, airflow, and thermal performance across street types.
Learning outcomes
These tools will support the development of modular cooling systems, microclimatic prototypes, and corridor-scale design strategies that are tested within the studio’s transects. By semester’s end, students will be prepared to diagnose heat vulnerability, design resilient street scenarios, communicate findings to public and professional audiences—including in a mid-term presentation in Albany—and contribute applied research to the Streetscape Toolkit for Extreme Heat (STEH).
Contribution
Taught to pair climate data, fieldwork, and environmental simulation to produce actionable design. Together, the studio offers an interdisciplinary experience grounded in urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture, preparing students to translate ecological processes into climate-adaptive design and engage the increasingly poly-ecological challenges shaping 21st-century cities.
Example work
See Kristine’s past studio work outcomes here:
https://buffalo.box.com/s/494c0lzv1ogl1c5vu27i0k6t027whw0p
Senior-friendly Manufactured Housing Prototypes
This studio will pair graduate architecture students with staff from the Rural Housing Coalition of New York (RHCNY) to address an urgent and often overlooked challenge of housing in rural communities: making sure that it is dignified, safe, affordable, energy efficient, resilient, and accessible. To accomplish this, we will examine a specific type: manufactured housing.
Across New York State, there are 192,890 manufactured houses which are 2.4% of the total housing stock. However, in rural areas, one in ten homes is either a manufactured house or a pre-1976 mobile home. These units are essential to rural affordability, offering a path to ownership, lower construction and operating costs than site-built homes, and a pathway to building intergenerational wealth. Yet many of these homes are aging, unsafe, energy inefficient, and inaccessible. Supported by an AARP Community Change Grant, this studio will offer students the rare opportunity to design this housing type while collaborating with statewide advocates and industry partners who can translate studio ideas into practice.
Working in small teams and as a collective studio, students will research universal design, energy efficiency, and climate resilience; tour a Titan Homes manufacturing facility and regional housing communities; and develop detailed digital models, drawings, and analyses that address access, constructability, cost, and environmental performance. The semester will culminate in a final presentation to partners in Albany, New York.
Mediating and Remediating Gowanus
The Spring 2026 Situated Technologies Graduate Design Research Studio will address the design of green infrastructure for multispecies urban environments, with a focus on integrating environmental sensing systems into urban landscapes. The integration of natural systems into urban design is an emerging focus in architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. We will investigate the design of green infrastructure that provides certain ecological services, such as habitat support, stormwater management, and climate regulation. We will embrace the fact that cities are rapidly becoming hubs of evolution where multiple species adapt to new conditions, and study how to integrate nonhuman needs into architecture and urban design. We will ask how – as architects – we might take the lead in an evolving field that places greater emphasis on ecological interdependence and fostering interspecies interaction. Finally, we will research and develop strategies for the integration of environmental sensing technologies in monitoring and observing urban ecosystems – an emerging practice that enables the design of responsive, data-driven urban landscapes.
Our site will be located within the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, along the Gowanus Canal. The system of creeks and estuaries in the Gowanus lowlands was dredged in 1869. With the decline of domestic shipping since the mid-20th century, the canal has seen decreasing use and has become one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency designated the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site, allocating $506 million for the cleanup of decades of industrial pollution and sewage contamination. While the cleanup continues, the area is becoming one of the city’s most ambitious development sites. More housing is going up right now in Gowanus than anywhere else in the city. The studio will begin by researching the nonhuman urban inhabitants of the Gowanus Canal and developing design criteria for habitat support and ecosystem interactions. We will identify and investigate technologies for sensing and observing more than human urban life and explore how they might reorganize how we interact with our broader shared environment. Following spring break, we will make a site visit to NYC, where we will meet with specialists in computational biology and urban horticulture, make studio visits to the studios of multispecies design practitioners, and visit significant examples of urban landscape interventions and green infrastructure projects distributed throughout the city. Upon returning from NYC, we will organize into teams. Each team will select a site along the Gowanus Canal and develop a design proposal for an urban landscape intervention that supports two or more species of urban inhabitants, integrating a simple environmental sensing platform to foster some form of interspecies interaction.
Faculty: Hiro Hata + Studio Advisor: Robert Shibley with QCHR Consortium
Client: Queen City Hub Revisited Consortium (a coalition of 10 organizations from public and private sectors, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) including Buffalo Place, BUDC, DOWNTOWN 2030, and more.
A Studio Brief:
On behalf of Professor Robert Shibley, SUNY distinguished professor and former Dean, I am excited to share this briefing of the spring 2026 Urban Design Studio. While I will be you’re your faculty member, Professor Shibley will be a frequent visitor/critic throughout the semester. COVID-19 left huge impact on downtown population: present daily population is half of the pre-COVID era resulting in vacant office spaces. Developers and owners of these buildings are looking for new opportunities to turn them into housing and other vibrant uses. To address these issues, a new Consortium headed by UB’s Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence launched Queen City Hub Revisit in 2024*. The studio has been recruited to address/work on the ongoing challenges to bring workers/visitors back to downtown, and add new residents to live, work and eat in downtown.
The Consortium is comprised of about 10 public and private organizations who will serve as the studio’s client.
The studio will bring a real-world problem into the classroom through a large-scale project in downtown Buffalo. The studio will be taught as an urban design studio integrating wide-ranging disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, transportation/infrastructure, real estate development, climate change, social science and equity. We use multi-scalar studies from 1/16” -- 1/32” -- 1/64” – 1/200-500”. Students will not only use computer modeling and physical model making but also free-hand sketching to develop the project.
The project’s intent is to develop three contiguous sites centered around Lafayette Square (see Exhibit 2):
• Site 1: a new landscape design of the square with consideration for its historic restoration
• Site 2: a new forecourt for the Buffalo/Erie County Library
• Site 3: the vacant site on Washington and Broadway
[In addition, the studio may recommend the city to consider traffic-diet on portions of William Street and Broadway].
After an Introduction phase, you will be asked to form up to four teams of 3-4 students. Each team will propose its urban design master plan for the three-combine site. You will work collaboratively throughout the semester, resulting in the production of 3-4 alternative urban design master plan for the three sites. At the end of the semester, all the teams will prepare and present each of master plan to Consortium and will publish a single-volume comprehensive report summarizing highlights of research and the alternative plans for the sites.
The studio will mount up to 5-6 in-house seminars/lectures hosted by members of Consortium and faculty. We will read key books/articles on the public spaces and urban design history, knowledge, and principles. We plan to take a field trip to New York City during spring break to visit some notable squares, parks, and places (students will make sketches on a notebook(s) for submission.
Appendix:
Lafayette Square is Buffalo’s oldest civic public space built at the end of the 19th century.
The square had been an oasis for downtown workers and shoppers for many decades. It served as a downtown retail hub and transit hub until 1980s when most merchants moved to suburban malls abandoning downtown nearly empty. The landscape design of the square had changed from an oasis at the beginning - to a traffic circle - and back to the current conditions. While a grove of mature maple trees created a shady place during the summer, trees are showing signs of stress of aging and pollution. It is time to consider a new landscape for the square.
The Queen City’s original plan drawn by Joseph Ellicott in 1804 is a classic baroque plan consisting of the radials and the grids. The perfect alignment of the Sailors-Soldiers monument on Lafayette Square and the McKinley monument on Niagara Square has created a view that is much admired by Ada Louise Huxtable, the former New York Times’ architecture critic, (one of) the America’s most significant viewsheds outside of Washington, D.C.
* Queen City Hub Revisit launched in 2024 was preceded by Queen City Hub of 2003. The latter has been the official Comprehensive Plan for downtown revitalization. It has produced the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and Canalside Development serving as the bookends of on Main Street.
Graduate Option Studio: Reimagining Kissing Bridge
This option studio—sponsored by Kissing Bridge All Seasons Resort—will explore the architectural and ecological challenges of designing a contemporary ski resort in the face of climate change, shifting recreation economies, and increasing environmental risks, where students will develop proposals for a resilient, all-seasons resort that addresses warming temperatures, reduced snowpack, fire risk, ecological sensitivity, and the socioeconomic future of mountain communities. Working closely with the team at Kissing Bridge (KB), the studio will focus its efforts on developing a "vision plan" for the future buildout of the resort, serving as a guiding framework for transforming the site into a year-round destination. As a means of contextualizing these efforts, the studio is being offered in conjunction with a technical methods course which will advance complementary research not only on the site at KB, but on climate resilience, vernacular alpine architecture, mountain resort site design, adaptive reuse, transportation access, seasonal (and cross-seasonal) programming, and environmental technologies to support a design that is both visionary and viable. While the studio will work primarily as a collective team on a single, large-scale vision, the resulting plan will also include proposals at the architectural scale—both to address KB's existing building stock, and to propose concepts for new construction projects and their phasing.
The Beautiful Game
2026 Gensler “Big Projects” Studio
In 2026 the World Cup is coming to North America, hosted by 16 cities between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Around the world, it is the most watched sporting event – with over 5 billion viewers over the course of the 2022 tournament. Yet, despite its vibrant sense of community and celebration, the World Cup – and the processes of planning and building for sporting events in general – have impacted the environment in many ways – from producing excessive carbon emissions to habitat destruction. Recognizing these impacts, both sports and building industries are working to integrate sustainability initiatives into the design and planning of sports stadiums. As an example, FIFA, the governing body of international-level soccer, has published a report that specifically highlights the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and outlines ecology and biodiversity as priorities in stadium development. Considering the goals of community-building, sustainability, biodiversity enhancement, and green infrastructure, this studio will focus on designing a mixed-use Major League Soccer Stadium. Working with professional architects, sports design specialists, and sustainability consultants from Gensler, we will address some of the challenges of designing a major sports stadium in an urban context. The semester will include two required field trips to Boston and New York City, which will be subsidized through Gensler’s sponsorship.
This advanced graduate design research studio applies AI-assisted workflows in architectural design to real-world spatial, environmental, and structural challenges. Building on the theoretical foundations and ethical frameworks explored in the Fall 2025 seminar (not required), students will engage in high-intensity, iterative design processes combining generative AI, parametric modeling, performance-driven evaluation, and physical prototyping.
Projects will be research-driven, addressing a contemporary design problem with measurable outcomes. Students will explore AI as actor, material, and provocateur—testing its role across problem definition, precedent analysis, design generation, optimization, and communication. A focus will be placed on balancing computational efficiency with critical design agency, ensuring AI enhances rather than overrides human decision-making.
⦿ STUDIO FRAMEWORK
This studio positions students as Next Generation Architects—designers fluent in artificial intelligence, computational workflows, and immersive spatial technologies. It challenges participants to leverage AI not as a novelty or automated replacement, but as a strategic design partner capable of expanding creative agency, enhancing performance-driven decision-making, and transforming how architecture is conceived, developed, and communicated.
Students will explore AI across the full design spectrum—from speculative conceptual generation to fabrication-ready models—while critically engaging with the ethical, cultural, and creative implications of machine-assisted design. Through hands-on integration of generative AI tools, AI-to-3D modeling workflows, and virtual reality environments, participants will learn to navigate a hybrid design space where human intuition and computational intelligence co-create the built environment.
In a rapidly evolving profession, the Next Generation Architect must operate fluently across physical, digital, and speculative domains. This course equips students with the tools, frameworks, and critical mindset to not only adapt to an AI-augmented design future but to shape it—setting the stage for architectural practice that is as innovative as it is responsible.
Please contact Stacey Komendat for additional information or questions.