Intersight Journal of Student Work

First published in 1990 as the School of Architecture and Planning's journal of student work, Intersight chronicles the creative and scholarly outputs of our students and reflects on the pedagogy of the school. This online collection represents more recent projects, published in the journal since 2018.

Interior of abandoned building corridor, peeling paint, two wheelchairs parked neatly off to the side.

From "Board and Batten," an adaptive reuse proposal for a 19th-century barn located on the historic Richardson Olmsted Campus in Buffalo; Preservation Planning Studio, Fall 2019 faculty Kerry Traynor. Exerpted from Intersight 22

Standing at more than 25 volumes, this anthology of student work captures the program's intellectual currents over the course of three decades. Intersight is curated and produced each year by a Master of Architecture student selected to serve as the Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow. This annual fellowship is generously supported by Kathryn Brunkow Sample and former UB President Steven Sample. Support for the production of the Intersight book publication is provided by CannonDesign.

Intersight 27 (IS27)

Sriya Radhakrishnan, M ARCH '25, 2024-2025 Brunkow Fellow Editor

Submit Work to IS27

Recent Issues

Intersight 26 celebrates 'compounding knowledge' the intersections between spaces, experiences, and identities

Intersight 26 (IS26), the School of Architecture and Planning's 2023 journal of student work, serves as an archive for significant ideas and events from the year. According to Madeleine Sophie Sutton, the School's 2023-24 Brunkow Fellow and editor of IS26, 'The intersections between spaces, experiences, and identities that I observed as a student led me to the theme of this book, 'Compounding Knowledge.' The publication reflects on the year by sharing stories that highlight pivotal moments in learning, illustrating how students connect their academic coursework with personal identities and life experiences. Presenting a diverse range of student works, IS26 captures the evolving narrative of our educational journey.

View Intersight 26 on Issuu

Intersight Archive

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Architecture BS
BAED (1)
MArch (1)

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.
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.
Architectural Sketching and the Built Environment
5/1/20
The sketches featured here were drawn after this course went completely remote. Before this transition class activities were dependent upon the freedom of movement and close inter-personal contact. Until this point the mode of interaction and learning was very direct and experiential.
Resilience Hub
5/1/20
During the Junior Spring semester an integrated design studio is carried out and aimed toward incorporating various systems into a larger building tectonic. In the Spring of 2020, students designed a laufmachine, a self-propelled, two-wheeled vehicle; it is the 19th century predecessor to the bicycle. This portion of the semester prompted students to begin thinking about a multitude of systems within their designs through this construction process.
Architectural Alchemy
5/1/20
The spring semester of 2020 for freshman architecture explored form in relation to the scale of the human body. This was done through examinations of scaled materials and the ways in which people interact with and sensorially respond to space. Students were encouraged to consider all construction scales as possessing the power to develop critical and influential architecture for those who interact with them.
Fitting In
5/1/20
Students in the sophomore year in the Spring of 2020 made many explorations regarding site context. This approach was taken to help students understand how architecture achieves a sense of belonging in a given place, especially in an ever-evolving context.
City/Life
12/1/18
The City/Life studio puts a focus on the urban dwelling as a threshold between self and society, between the local and the goal, and between nature and culture.
Seneca Bluffs Public Pool
12/1/18
Brianna Mancini’s proposal for a community pool is rooted in process. An intensive analysis of precedents generated concepts, which were then collaged together to generate a synthesis drawing. This new geometry formed the basis and inspiration for both the conceptual and formal paradigms of the proposal.
Stasis
12/1/18
This vessel became a design muse and instrument for the studio, investigating many fundamental questions that pertain to the tectonics of architecture—space and geometry, structure and skin, form and function, as well as material and construction.
Ritual Space
6/1/18
Ritual Space is a collection of ten structures, each designed and constructed by studio teams in first-year design studio. Finding its beginnings in the development of an interlocking joint system, students adapted this tectonic item into an evocative, spatial proposal.
Interlock
7/18/17
Architecture is an art because it is interested not only in the original need of shelter but also in putting together spaces and materials in a meaningful manner. This occurs through formal and actual joints. The joint, that is the fertile detail, is the place where both the construction and the construing of architecture take place.
-Marco Frascari