Exhibition Dates
August 28–September 11, 2026 
9:00 am–4:30 pm

Location
Hayes Hall, Atrium
UB South Campus
250 Hayes Rd
Buffalo, NY 14214

The studio My Neighbor Upstairs exposed second-semester, three-year graduate architecture students to the complexities of collective housing with a special focus on sectional strategies. The brief proposed that the 20+ units of the program had to have at least one double-height space or some form of height variation, and the semi-public program at least a triple-height space. These requirements created a series of constraints that became generative opportunities. They aimed to avoid purely horizontal organizations and instead promoted interactive visual and physical connections between the dwelling and the collective, between the private and the public.

The studio operated within the compound designed by Henry Hobson Richardson in collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux at the end of the nineteenth century as the Buffalo Mental Asylum. Although it is part of the campus today, Building 13 was built later, in 1924, as a dining facility for the male wing of the asylum. This structure was later used as a manufacturing facility until the late 1990s, when the building became vacant. The students could choose to maintain or replace the interior structure, as well as the cores.

The intention behind the selection of Building 13 as the envelope of the new program was twofold: to encourage design work from within, from the inside out, and to incorporate the challenges and opportunities of architectural reuse of existing heritage into the discussion.

Housing is a hot topic not only in our growing city, but also across the country and the world; involving architectural heritage creates an opportunity to address the reuse and integration of existing structures, especially at a time of necessary attention to strategies of material reuse, energy consumption, and resource optimization.

Curated by
Miguel Guitart, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture

ARC 502 Students:
Emily DiMarco and Emily Zak (Bridges)
Wema Kiboino and Brandon Warren (Lightwells)
Jillian Daniels and Liam Henry (Align)
Anna Rutberg and Maggie Manzella (Shifting Heights)
Mason Pugh and Andrew Bilezikian (Lightcrest)
Michael McDeid and Brandon Scott (Common Ground)
Caden Suplita, Matthieu Liu, and Nidaa Arab (Eden Court)
Dixie Dykens and Louis Khant (The Backyard) 

Acknowledgments
Steph Cramer, Julia Hunt, Wade Georgi, Maia Peck, Bruce Majkowski, Danny Escandon, Paris Roselli, and Martha Gorman