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Our Work

Explore the scholarly, curricular and creative work of our faculty and students as we mobilize our disciplines on today's most pressing societal challenges. Through studios, sponsored and independent research, faculty and students across our programs engage with real-world projects that reimagine our built environment, innovate modes of practice and transform communities both locally and globally.

Learn more

Our approach to research
"Be the Plus" 50th anniversary blog
View Intersight, our journal of student work

Project sort

Discipline

Degree

From our journal of student work

Type

Topics

  • Introducing Architectural Theory: Expanding the Disciplinary Debate
    11/20/23
    Building on the success of the first edition, an engaging and reader-friendly work on complex ideas, Introducing Architectural Theory: Expanding the Disciplinary Debate, broadens the range of themes, voices, and geographies represented to provide a more comprehensive and contemporary theory book.　 
  • CRE Development Strategies and Practice
    2/7/23
    The School of Architecture and Planning’s Master of Real Estate Development program (MSRED) is one of only a few programs in the U.S. offering interdisciplinary studies of real estate development with architecture and urban planning. UB's MSRED program offers a course in commercial real estate (CRE) development strategies and practices as a capstone to the program. In the Fall 2021 capstone course, students pulled together knowledge that they learned throughout the three-semester program. The course enabled students to pursue their personal career interests by acting as an industry developer building their own CRE project
  • Piecemeal Urbanism
    2/7/23
    Piecemeal Urbanism looks to capture the dynamic and unpredictable life of buildings that traditional photos, drawings, and models cannot fully capture. Morgan Mansfield explored methods of visualizing transformation of architecture through the continual change of these buildings to ask how a representational toolkit can respond to architecture’s temporal nature.
  • Signs of Life
    2/7/23
    The Signs of Life Summer 2021 studio rekindled a relationship with Griffis Sculpture Park, a 425-acre park dedicated to experimentation and expression. The park was first established by Larry Griffis Jr., an artist set on creating a haven for art, imagination and play within the Allegheny Mountains. In addition to its continued role as a public sculpture park, it has served as a testing ground for a series of architecture design studios and a place for permanent installations by members of the University at Buffalo
  • Storefront Afterlife
    2/7/23
    Buffalo’s East Side has provided students with examples of successful revitalization projects for inspiration, such as the Broadway Market and the Buffalo Central Terminal. However, there are many other instances where storefront revitalization has not seen the same favorable outcome.
  • Caution Sails
    2/7/23
    Caution sails culminated from a Fall 2020 urban design studio, Building Brydges, where students were tasked with looking at the Niagara Falls Public Library and asked to take an in-depth look at the library’s history, architecture and its architect, Paul Rudolph
  • Gowanus: Our Space
    2/2/23
    The Fall 2021 graduate option studio was a collaborative studio ran by members of Dark Matter University (DMU), a democratic network guided by the principle that people cannot survive or thrive without immediate change toward an anti-racist model of design education and practice. 
  • On the Edge
    1/26/23
    The studio culture is meant to help students adjust to their new environment and new ways of thinking while supporting their growth through contact with graduate students and other faculty throughout their introductory semester.
  • Buffalo:A Green Archipelago?
    1/26/23
    In Spring 2021, students within the Master of Architecture program’s Urban Design studio worked with Master of Urban Planning (MUP) and dual-degree students in direct correspondence with People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), a Buffalo nonprofit organization. The students within this studio worked closely with PUSH to develop a neighborhood development plan as a response to their Green Development Zone (GDZ). 
  • New Middles
    1/26/23
    The Spring of 2021 fostered a foundation of support for the research and ecology of work done by Associate Professor Joyce Hwang. Hwang’s research and architecture to support middle species (mice, bats, raccoons, birds, etc.) Includes several installations across the country and in Buffalo, like the "Bat Cloud" in Buffalo’s Tifft Nature Preserve.
  • Covid-19 Evictions in the Rust Belt
    1/25/23
    This student report analyzed the effects of the          COVID-19 pandemic on the eviction rates of the Rust Belt Cities of Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Detroit. These cities were chosen by the studio specifically due to their existing conditions. Within these Rust Belt cities, there is heightened housing instability due to factors created by systemic racism. The report offers recommendations for programs and policies to prevent evictions and improve housing stability within these cities and others like them.
  • Invisible Cities
    1/25/23
    The Architectural Sketching and Environments course presents students with a unique experience. Throughout the semester, the class examines modern perspectives on the physical environment, uncovering the relationship between natural and constructed. Using sketching as a medium to see, feel and think, students draw their surroundings, ranging in content and scale from human movement, to built structures, to natural spaces. Students focus on enhancing their ability to draw from imagination and establishing a conceptual perspective from the mind. Through drawing, students can find themselves participating in an act of discovery. It is important for designers to be able to perceive a written visual and translate it to paper. However, this process is different for everyone. Students worked on creating visuals in the form of a physical object set within a landscape at an unattainable distance, or through a visual dreamt up within their mind. Architectural sketching is a skillset aspiring architects and designers develop through time and practice. Invisible Cities, a series of illustrations by Samantha Fox, draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – a book that describes Venice as a series of fantastical places. Calvino depicts cities of various terrains, scales and inhabitants. By reading excerpts from Invisible Cities, Fox created her own city, Arborea: a city perched in the trees, and a tight-knit community interconnected by bridges and zip lines. The city is lit by hanging lanterns, sparking it alive day and night. Building these cities through a mixed media of micron pen and copic marker allowed the city to come to life, and viewers to imagine themselves there.
  • African Canopy for Utica Station
    1/25/23
    The 2021 Inclusive Design graduate studio worked to create a proposal for a new installation at Utica Street Station in Buffalo. This project came about through efforts between the City of Buffalo, the Niagara Frontier Transit Authority (NFTA) and the School of Architecture and Planning to honor the late Robert Traynham Coles, a Black architect who designed the station along with many other buildings in Buffalo. 
  • Tandem Cloudgazing
    1/23/23
    In Spring 2021, freshmen architecture students explored combining material systems, simple building components and fundamental actions to create built prototypes that are, in an alchemical way, greater than the sum of their individual parts. 
  • Firing
    1/23/23
    Historically, fire is the process of combustion ignited through the chemical reaction of heat, oxygen and fuel. Students examined historical contexts of fire within the world as ritualistic events or elements of survival.
  • Structurosity
    1/19/23
    The School of Architecture and Planning offers a myriad of courses under the label of "Structures." Structures is a set of applied physics courses that have transitioned from the traditional lecture heavy, math-based learning to lab-based learning within the Fabrication Workshop, a 5,000-square-foot workspace equipped with tools and technology to help students broaden their fabrication skills. 
  • Microhome, Modular Home
    1/19/23
    For this Summer 2021 studio, students focused on the design of a micro home and modular home to be entered into two design competitions. The overarching theme across both home types was to introduce a design strategy in response to specific environmental contexts and target users. Students considered what it means to design for a specific group or communal need, or how various pro - grammatic spaces could function when overall building footprint and square footage requirements are limited.
  • Good Neighbors
    1/19/23
    We challenge the notion that entering the field at the graduate level is a disadvantage and work to ensure each student succeeds in the program.
  • Aberrant Ecologies
    1/17/23
    For the Spring 2021 Ecological Practices intellectual domain seminar, students explored and analyzed "undesired" natures within their city, identifying "aberrant ecologies." Students worked through methods of analog making to investigate these instances and rediscover them as opportunities for natural growth in the built environment. They paired photographs of their natural environment with their own artworks to prompt questions around how nature participates with the city in unexpected ways.
  • Convergent Histories
    1/17/23
    How do we preserve and interpret spaces where the material fabric has been destroyed, often by policies and programs that target marginalized communities?
  • Housing as Process
    1/13/23
    For the past few years, this studio proposed new high-density housing in New York City. This year, students shifted their view to Buffalo’s East Side and the Pratt Willert neighborhood. Students investigated how different methods of housing can create a response to city conditions.
  • The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods Renaissance and Resurgence
    12/13/22
    This book sheds new light on the assumptions underlying neighborhood change.
  • Figure to Fiber
    12/9/22
    The Spring 2021 Situated Technologies research studio returned to the topics of geometry and topology through surface disclinations, introduced by Assistant Professor Nicholas Bruscia in 2019 as both a developing area of research and a pedagogical exercise.
  • Minus Minimums
    3/21/22
    Eliminating parking minimums can reduce unnecessary parking supply and encourage development constrained by excessive minimum requirements. Land use, location, and transportation demand initiatives affect the quantity of off-street parking supplied in response to market conditions. Our findings suggest mixed-use developers are likely to take advantage of the ability to provide less parking in highly accessible locations. Though many developers quickly pivot to the newfound possibilities of providing fewer parking spaces, others continue to meet earlier requirements. Cities of all types stand to benefit from undoing constraining parking policies of the past and allowing developers to transform parking lots to “higher uses.”
  • Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism: Resettlement Urbanism in Buffalo, New York
    12/20/21

    Buffalo at the Crossroads is a collection of essays where twelve authors highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. Özay’s contribution reflects on the urban impacts of refugee resettlement in Buffalo, situating in the historic context of immigration and pluralism fostered by the city.

  • Planning Corruption or Corrupting Planning?
    12/1/21
    Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, and Wes Grooms, planning theorist, urban political economist and a visiting assistant professor of urban and regional planning, join forces with renowned authors  to better understand corruption and how it complicates planning. 
  • Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scale
    11/16/21

    This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities.

  • Evaluating users’ perceptions of a Main Street corridor: Before and after a Complete Street project
    10/1/21

    The evaluation of users’ perceptions of a Main Street corridor was carried out through a post occupancy evaluation (POE) methodology was used to evaluate a Complete Street (CS) project and the findings highlight the need for outreach and evidence-based CS implementation.

  • Barry Sampson Teaching + Practice
    9/14/21

    This book documents the ideas and work of notable Canadian architect Barry Sampson, who was Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto for nearly thirty years, and an instrumental part of the evolution of Baird Sampson Neuert, a significant critical practice in Toronto that influenced the development of ideas in the city, throughout the region, and more widely.

  • Code as urban vision: A critique of the Buffalo Green Code
    9/1/21

    This paper provides a critical reflection on the Buffalo Green Code and the city’s efforts to elevate it as a comprehensive vision for the city. The paper pays particular attention to the affordable housing and vacant land challenges of the city, which remain unaddressed in the code, despite the claims of comprehensiveness.

  • Giga Shed Urbanism
    8/1/21

    Reid Hetzel (MArch '21) was recognized with the Design Excellence Award for his thesis, a reimagining of Buffalo's Tesla Gigafactory as civic space,

  • Rooting Resilience: Planning for the future of urban agriculture in Buffalo, New York
    8/1/21

    Lanika Sanders, a 2021 graduate of the Master of Urban Planning program, was recognized with the MUP Best Professional Project for her research on Buffalo’s urban agriculture landscape, synthesizing existing plans and policies to highlight opportunities for enhancement of Buffalo's agricultural capacity.

  • Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present
    1/14/21

    This volume of essays offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century.

  • Good Neighbors Studio
    12/15/20
    The fifth edition of the studio will emphasize critical thinking on basic architectural issues through the design proposal of a group of three houses for three very different families that will be sharing a single undivided lot in the east side of the city of Buffalo, New York – the City of Good Neighbors.
  • Good Neighbors
    12/1/20
    The fifth edition of this studio, the introductory studio experience to the 3.-5-year Master of Architecture program, emphasizes critical thinking on basic architectural issues through design proposals for a group of three houses for three different families sharing a single undivided lot.
  • Efflorescence
    12/1/20
    The Fall 2020 semester for junior architecture studio focused on the Tectonics of Buoyancy and the Buffalo Niagara Region’s relationship and response to water’s edge. This design studio encourages students to re-examine the prevailing Western tendency to fortify ourselves against the elements for fear of catastrophic ecological, social, and cultural impacts. Throughout the semester, students explored the relationship between human settlement and water and how architects can offer new tectonic responses to these issues. 
  • Urban Life: Self + Society
    12/1/20
    In the Fall of 2020, students in the Senior class designed multiple-unit housing within the Bedford Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn, New York. The semester focused on the urban dwelling as a threshold between self and society, between local and global, and between nature and culture. This project aimed to develop connections in the student’s mind about context and developing systems of housing that would relate to a greater social, technical, cultural, political, and economic understanding of urban space.
  • Upstate Road Train
    12/1/20
    The Upstate Road Train (URT) proposed for New York State is a state-of-the-art concept for intercity transportation. The overarching idea for this report was provided by Tim Tielman, executive director of the Campaign for Greater Buffalo History, Architecture & Culture. This report analyzes existing infrastructure to recommend how this URT system can be integrated into its fabric.
  • Neighborhood Walk
    12/1/20
    This project invited urban planning students to plan and carry out a walk through a neighborhood of their choice. Their walking route needed to be safely navigable as a pedestrian and between .5 and 1 mile in length (around a half hour walk).
  • Methods in Preservation
    12/1/20
    This course introduces students to the basic guidelines, standards, research methods, and documentation techniques used in historic preservation to identify and record historic structures and sites. These kinds of research techniques explored by students included the development of site descriptions, creating historical narratives, reviewing existing scholarly and/or professional literature, collecting primary and secondary data, developing skills in architectural photography, and understanding the basics of documenting and analyzing historic material fabric. The course makes use of lectures, discussions, and fieldwork to introduce the various ways in which preservationists document historic sites and resources.
  • Villusion
    12/1/20
    This short film was created using the zoom interface by two students studying on different continents. Miguel Ortiz-Teed, working in Buffalo, and Yogesh Ravichandar, working in India, wanted to examine and express the specific difficulties of personal interaction in the video-conference environment.
  • People & Place
    12/1/20
    Willert Park Courts (WPC), known today as A.D. Price Homes, is currently a vacant residential housing complex made up of ten buildings located in the Ellicott District of the east side of Buffalo, New York.
  • Transformable Shells
    12/1/20
    In 2018, the School of Architecture and Planning hosted a competition to address a design problem: students sitting on the HVAC units in the newly renovated Hayes Hall. The competition embraced the issue by inviting students to offer a design solution that would allow students to use the systems in a safe manner.
  • Near-Term Strategies for the Northland Campus
    12/1/20
    For decades, the area around Northland Avenue suffered from divestment and abandonment, especially as many of its former manufacturing anchors succumbed to outside economic forces. Due to the adjacent Belt Line railroad, the corridor had become a strategic industrial hub able to move both people and products en masse. Once home to manufacturers such as Houdaille Industries, Otis Elevator Company, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, Northland Rubber Company, and Niagara Machine & Tool Works (later Clearing Niagara), the products that left the loading docks went on to forge modern America. A blue-collar workforce, building aircraft engines, plunger elevators, and automobile parts, established residency near their employers starting around the turn of the 20th Century. Over time, this pattern of settlement formed the Delavan Grider neighborhood we know today.
  • Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore
    8/18/20

    Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.

  • The Fifth Ugliest College Campus in America
    8/1/20
    The campus story of the University at Buffalo is an alliterative tale of excessive optimism and investment, followed by passive indifference and resignation. The result: three campuses—each a stunted fragment of a vision left unfulfilled—the whole less than the sum of its parts. This seminar explored the trials and tribulations of university growth and campus planning at UB—acknowledging the university's checkered past as a means to project a more effective campus future.
  • Botanical Garden Master Plan
    8/1/20
    The North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens is an 11-acre site located on 1825 Sweeney Street in North Tonawanda, NY, bordering the Niagara River. The site is overseen by the North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens Organization (NTBGO), a nonprofit working towards restoring the garden to a scenic destination for community education and activity. Three members of the NTBGO, David Conti, Robbyn Drake and Laura Pecoraro, gave students the opportunity to design a proposal for the renovation and re-imagination of the North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens.
  • Off the Grid
    8/1/20
    During the Summer 2020 semester, Off the Grid, led by Professor Jon Spielman, was one of three remote programs being offered. This studio investigated new ways of exploring systems requiring energy established by the man-made grid system. 
Socials Our Work

Our Work

Explore the scholarly, curricular and creative work of our faculty and students as we mobilize our disciplines on today's most pressing societal challenges. Through studios, sponsored and independent research, faculty and students across our programs engage with real-world projects that reimagine our built environment, innovate modes of practice and transform communities both locally and globally.

Learn more

Our approach to research
"Be the Plus" 50th anniversary blog
View Intersight, our journal of student work

Project sort

Discipline

Degree

From our journal of student work

Type

Topics

  • Introducing Architectural Theory: Expanding the Disciplinary Debate
    11/20/23
    Building on the success of the first edition, an engaging and reader-friendly work on complex ideas, Introducing Architectural Theory: Expanding the Disciplinary Debate, broadens the range of themes, voices, and geographies represented to provide a more comprehensive and contemporary theory book.　 
  • CRE Development Strategies and Practice
    2/7/23
    The School of Architecture and Planning’s Master of Real Estate Development program (MSRED) is one of only a few programs in the U.S. offering interdisciplinary studies of real estate development with architecture and urban planning. UB's MSRED program offers a course in commercial real estate (CRE) development strategies and practices as a capstone to the program. In the Fall 2021 capstone course, students pulled together knowledge that they learned throughout the three-semester program. The course enabled students to pursue their personal career interests by acting as an industry developer building their own CRE project
  • Piecemeal Urbanism
    2/7/23
    Piecemeal Urbanism looks to capture the dynamic and unpredictable life of buildings that traditional photos, drawings, and models cannot fully capture. Morgan Mansfield explored methods of visualizing transformation of architecture through the continual change of these buildings to ask how a representational toolkit can respond to architecture’s temporal nature.
  • Signs of Life
    2/7/23
    The Signs of Life Summer 2021 studio rekindled a relationship with Griffis Sculpture Park, a 425-acre park dedicated to experimentation and expression. The park was first established by Larry Griffis Jr., an artist set on creating a haven for art, imagination and play within the Allegheny Mountains. In addition to its continued role as a public sculpture park, it has served as a testing ground for a series of architecture design studios and a place for permanent installations by members of the University at Buffalo
  • Storefront Afterlife
    2/7/23
    Buffalo’s East Side has provided students with examples of successful revitalization projects for inspiration, such as the Broadway Market and the Buffalo Central Terminal. However, there are many other instances where storefront revitalization has not seen the same favorable outcome.
  • Caution Sails
    2/7/23
    Caution sails culminated from a Fall 2020 urban design studio, Building Brydges, where students were tasked with looking at the Niagara Falls Public Library and asked to take an in-depth look at the library’s history, architecture and its architect, Paul Rudolph
  • Gowanus: Our Space
    2/2/23
    The Fall 2021 graduate option studio was a collaborative studio ran by members of Dark Matter University (DMU), a democratic network guided by the principle that people cannot survive or thrive without immediate change toward an anti-racist model of design education and practice. 
  • On the Edge
    1/26/23
    The studio culture is meant to help students adjust to their new environment and new ways of thinking while supporting their growth through contact with graduate students and other faculty throughout their introductory semester.
  • Buffalo:A Green Archipelago?
    1/26/23
    In Spring 2021, students within the Master of Architecture program’s Urban Design studio worked with Master of Urban Planning (MUP) and dual-degree students in direct correspondence with People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), a Buffalo nonprofit organization. The students within this studio worked closely with PUSH to develop a neighborhood development plan as a response to their Green Development Zone (GDZ). 
  • New Middles
    1/26/23
    The Spring of 2021 fostered a foundation of support for the research and ecology of work done by Associate Professor Joyce Hwang. Hwang’s research and architecture to support middle species (mice, bats, raccoons, birds, etc.) Includes several installations across the country and in Buffalo, like the "Bat Cloud" in Buffalo’s Tifft Nature Preserve.
  • Covid-19 Evictions in the Rust Belt
    1/25/23
    This student report analyzed the effects of the          COVID-19 pandemic on the eviction rates of the Rust Belt Cities of Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Detroit. These cities were chosen by the studio specifically due to their existing conditions. Within these Rust Belt cities, there is heightened housing instability due to factors created by systemic racism. The report offers recommendations for programs and policies to prevent evictions and improve housing stability within these cities and others like them.
  • Invisible Cities
    1/25/23
    The Architectural Sketching and Environments course presents students with a unique experience. Throughout the semester, the class examines modern perspectives on the physical environment, uncovering the relationship between natural and constructed. Using sketching as a medium to see, feel and think, students draw their surroundings, ranging in content and scale from human movement, to built structures, to natural spaces. Students focus on enhancing their ability to draw from imagination and establishing a conceptual perspective from the mind. Through drawing, students can find themselves participating in an act of discovery. It is important for designers to be able to perceive a written visual and translate it to paper. However, this process is different for everyone. Students worked on creating visuals in the form of a physical object set within a landscape at an unattainable distance, or through a visual dreamt up within their mind. Architectural sketching is a skillset aspiring architects and designers develop through time and practice. Invisible Cities, a series of illustrations by Samantha Fox, draws inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – a book that describes Venice as a series of fantastical places. Calvino depicts cities of various terrains, scales and inhabitants. By reading excerpts from Invisible Cities, Fox created her own city, Arborea: a city perched in the trees, and a tight-knit community interconnected by bridges and zip lines. The city is lit by hanging lanterns, sparking it alive day and night. Building these cities through a mixed media of micron pen and copic marker allowed the city to come to life, and viewers to imagine themselves there.
  • African Canopy for Utica Station
    1/25/23
    The 2021 Inclusive Design graduate studio worked to create a proposal for a new installation at Utica Street Station in Buffalo. This project came about through efforts between the City of Buffalo, the Niagara Frontier Transit Authority (NFTA) and the School of Architecture and Planning to honor the late Robert Traynham Coles, a Black architect who designed the station along with many other buildings in Buffalo. 
  • Tandem Cloudgazing
    1/23/23
    In Spring 2021, freshmen architecture students explored combining material systems, simple building components and fundamental actions to create built prototypes that are, in an alchemical way, greater than the sum of their individual parts. 
  • Firing
    1/23/23
    Historically, fire is the process of combustion ignited through the chemical reaction of heat, oxygen and fuel. Students examined historical contexts of fire within the world as ritualistic events or elements of survival.
  • Structurosity
    1/19/23
    The School of Architecture and Planning offers a myriad of courses under the label of "Structures." Structures is a set of applied physics courses that have transitioned from the traditional lecture heavy, math-based learning to lab-based learning within the Fabrication Workshop, a 5,000-square-foot workspace equipped with tools and technology to help students broaden their fabrication skills. 
  • Microhome, Modular Home
    1/19/23
    For this Summer 2021 studio, students focused on the design of a micro home and modular home to be entered into two design competitions. The overarching theme across both home types was to introduce a design strategy in response to specific environmental contexts and target users. Students considered what it means to design for a specific group or communal need, or how various pro - grammatic spaces could function when overall building footprint and square footage requirements are limited.
  • Good Neighbors
    1/19/23
    We challenge the notion that entering the field at the graduate level is a disadvantage and work to ensure each student succeeds in the program.
  • Aberrant Ecologies
    1/17/23
    For the Spring 2021 Ecological Practices intellectual domain seminar, students explored and analyzed "undesired" natures within their city, identifying "aberrant ecologies." Students worked through methods of analog making to investigate these instances and rediscover them as opportunities for natural growth in the built environment. They paired photographs of their natural environment with their own artworks to prompt questions around how nature participates with the city in unexpected ways.
  • Convergent Histories
    1/17/23
    How do we preserve and interpret spaces where the material fabric has been destroyed, often by policies and programs that target marginalized communities?
  • Housing as Process
    1/13/23
    For the past few years, this studio proposed new high-density housing in New York City. This year, students shifted their view to Buffalo’s East Side and the Pratt Willert neighborhood. Students investigated how different methods of housing can create a response to city conditions.
  • The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods Renaissance and Resurgence
    12/13/22
    This book sheds new light on the assumptions underlying neighborhood change.
  • Figure to Fiber
    12/9/22
    The Spring 2021 Situated Technologies research studio returned to the topics of geometry and topology through surface disclinations, introduced by Assistant Professor Nicholas Bruscia in 2019 as both a developing area of research and a pedagogical exercise.
  • Minus Minimums
    3/21/22
    Eliminating parking minimums can reduce unnecessary parking supply and encourage development constrained by excessive minimum requirements. Land use, location, and transportation demand initiatives affect the quantity of off-street parking supplied in response to market conditions. Our findings suggest mixed-use developers are likely to take advantage of the ability to provide less parking in highly accessible locations. Though many developers quickly pivot to the newfound possibilities of providing fewer parking spaces, others continue to meet earlier requirements. Cities of all types stand to benefit from undoing constraining parking policies of the past and allowing developers to transform parking lots to “higher uses.”
  • Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism: Resettlement Urbanism in Buffalo, New York
    12/20/21

    Buffalo at the Crossroads is a collection of essays where twelve authors highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. Özay’s contribution reflects on the urban impacts of refugee resettlement in Buffalo, situating in the historic context of immigration and pluralism fostered by the city.

  • Planning Corruption or Corrupting Planning?
    12/1/21
    Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, and Wes Grooms, planning theorist, urban political economist and a visiting assistant professor of urban and regional planning, join forces with renowned authors  to better understand corruption and how it complicates planning. 
  • Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scale
    11/16/21

    This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities.

  • Evaluating users’ perceptions of a Main Street corridor: Before and after a Complete Street project
    10/1/21

    The evaluation of users’ perceptions of a Main Street corridor was carried out through a post occupancy evaluation (POE) methodology was used to evaluate a Complete Street (CS) project and the findings highlight the need for outreach and evidence-based CS implementation.

  • Barry Sampson Teaching + Practice
    9/14/21

    This book documents the ideas and work of notable Canadian architect Barry Sampson, who was Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto for nearly thirty years, and an instrumental part of the evolution of Baird Sampson Neuert, a significant critical practice in Toronto that influenced the development of ideas in the city, throughout the region, and more widely.

  • Code as urban vision: A critique of the Buffalo Green Code
    9/1/21

    This paper provides a critical reflection on the Buffalo Green Code and the city’s efforts to elevate it as a comprehensive vision for the city. The paper pays particular attention to the affordable housing and vacant land challenges of the city, which remain unaddressed in the code, despite the claims of comprehensiveness.

  • Giga Shed Urbanism
    8/1/21

    Reid Hetzel (MArch '21) was recognized with the Design Excellence Award for his thesis, a reimagining of Buffalo's Tesla Gigafactory as civic space,

  • Rooting Resilience: Planning for the future of urban agriculture in Buffalo, New York
    8/1/21

    Lanika Sanders, a 2021 graduate of the Master of Urban Planning program, was recognized with the MUP Best Professional Project for her research on Buffalo’s urban agriculture landscape, synthesizing existing plans and policies to highlight opportunities for enhancement of Buffalo's agricultural capacity.

  • Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present
    1/14/21

    This volume of essays offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century.

  • Good Neighbors Studio
    12/15/20
    The fifth edition of the studio will emphasize critical thinking on basic architectural issues through the design proposal of a group of three houses for three very different families that will be sharing a single undivided lot in the east side of the city of Buffalo, New York – the City of Good Neighbors.
  • Good Neighbors
    12/1/20
    The fifth edition of this studio, the introductory studio experience to the 3.-5-year Master of Architecture program, emphasizes critical thinking on basic architectural issues through design proposals for a group of three houses for three different families sharing a single undivided lot.
  • Efflorescence
    12/1/20
    The Fall 2020 semester for junior architecture studio focused on the Tectonics of Buoyancy and the Buffalo Niagara Region’s relationship and response to water’s edge. This design studio encourages students to re-examine the prevailing Western tendency to fortify ourselves against the elements for fear of catastrophic ecological, social, and cultural impacts. Throughout the semester, students explored the relationship between human settlement and water and how architects can offer new tectonic responses to these issues. 
  • Urban Life: Self + Society
    12/1/20
    In the Fall of 2020, students in the Senior class designed multiple-unit housing within the Bedford Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn, New York. The semester focused on the urban dwelling as a threshold between self and society, between local and global, and between nature and culture. This project aimed to develop connections in the student’s mind about context and developing systems of housing that would relate to a greater social, technical, cultural, political, and economic understanding of urban space.
  • Upstate Road Train
    12/1/20
    The Upstate Road Train (URT) proposed for New York State is a state-of-the-art concept for intercity transportation. The overarching idea for this report was provided by Tim Tielman, executive director of the Campaign for Greater Buffalo History, Architecture & Culture. This report analyzes existing infrastructure to recommend how this URT system can be integrated into its fabric.
  • Neighborhood Walk
    12/1/20
    This project invited urban planning students to plan and carry out a walk through a neighborhood of their choice. Their walking route needed to be safely navigable as a pedestrian and between .5 and 1 mile in length (around a half hour walk).
  • Methods in Preservation
    12/1/20
    This course introduces students to the basic guidelines, standards, research methods, and documentation techniques used in historic preservation to identify and record historic structures and sites. These kinds of research techniques explored by students included the development of site descriptions, creating historical narratives, reviewing existing scholarly and/or professional literature, collecting primary and secondary data, developing skills in architectural photography, and understanding the basics of documenting and analyzing historic material fabric. The course makes use of lectures, discussions, and fieldwork to introduce the various ways in which preservationists document historic sites and resources.
  • Villusion
    12/1/20
    This short film was created using the zoom interface by two students studying on different continents. Miguel Ortiz-Teed, working in Buffalo, and Yogesh Ravichandar, working in India, wanted to examine and express the specific difficulties of personal interaction in the video-conference environment.
  • People & Place
    12/1/20
    Willert Park Courts (WPC), known today as A.D. Price Homes, is currently a vacant residential housing complex made up of ten buildings located in the Ellicott District of the east side of Buffalo, New York.
  • Transformable Shells
    12/1/20
    In 2018, the School of Architecture and Planning hosted a competition to address a design problem: students sitting on the HVAC units in the newly renovated Hayes Hall. The competition embraced the issue by inviting students to offer a design solution that would allow students to use the systems in a safe manner.
  • Near-Term Strategies for the Northland Campus
    12/1/20
    For decades, the area around Northland Avenue suffered from divestment and abandonment, especially as many of its former manufacturing anchors succumbed to outside economic forces. Due to the adjacent Belt Line railroad, the corridor had become a strategic industrial hub able to move both people and products en masse. Once home to manufacturers such as Houdaille Industries, Otis Elevator Company, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, Northland Rubber Company, and Niagara Machine & Tool Works (later Clearing Niagara), the products that left the loading docks went on to forge modern America. A blue-collar workforce, building aircraft engines, plunger elevators, and automobile parts, established residency near their employers starting around the turn of the 20th Century. Over time, this pattern of settlement formed the Delavan Grider neighborhood we know today.
  • Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore
    8/18/20

    Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.

  • The Fifth Ugliest College Campus in America
    8/1/20
    The campus story of the University at Buffalo is an alliterative tale of excessive optimism and investment, followed by passive indifference and resignation. The result: three campuses—each a stunted fragment of a vision left unfulfilled—the whole less than the sum of its parts. This seminar explored the trials and tribulations of university growth and campus planning at UB—acknowledging the university's checkered past as a means to project a more effective campus future.
  • Botanical Garden Master Plan
    8/1/20
    The North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens is an 11-acre site located on 1825 Sweeney Street in North Tonawanda, NY, bordering the Niagara River. The site is overseen by the North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens Organization (NTBGO), a nonprofit working towards restoring the garden to a scenic destination for community education and activity. Three members of the NTBGO, David Conti, Robbyn Drake and Laura Pecoraro, gave students the opportunity to design a proposal for the renovation and re-imagination of the North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens.
  • Off the Grid
    8/1/20
    During the Summer 2020 semester, Off the Grid, led by Professor Jon Spielman, was one of three remote programs being offered. This studio investigated new ways of exploring systems requiring energy established by the man-made grid system.