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

Featured projects

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.
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.
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.
Playing Against Type
5/1/20
The Spring 2020 Inclusive Design studio, Playing Against Type, was a critique on the typological thinking present in western architecture. Assistant Professor Charles Davis encouraged students to examine the reuse of European-inspired developer housing by the material customs of Black life on Buffalo’s East Side. It is understood within these investigations that the typological diagram of a building emulates the function of the cultural potentials of “primitive” peoples against the standards and norms of European civilization.
Solitude Pavilion
5/1/20
Solitude Pavilion is located on the University at Buffalo’s South Campus between Hayes Hall and the Hayes B Annex. The project aims to create a nesting environment by combining two contrasting systems using terracotta as the primary material.
Victorian Dreams
5/1/20
Encompassing the period from about 1840-1900, Victorian architecture is characterized by a wide range of interpretations and re-combinations of distinctly different historical traditions. The evolution of Victorian architecture was spurred by many factors including the desire of building owners to create associations with past cultures and times, the role of builders (carpenters, masons, cabinetmakers, etc.) as designers, and the newly emergent technological capacities of industrial mass production.
Restoring Scajaquada Creek
5/1/20
Architecture and urban planning students in a joint urban design studio explored redevelopment solutions for the Scajaquada Creek corridor and opportunities to integrate the natural and surrounding built contexts to boost public health.
Domesticity and Mass Customization
5/1/20
The Situated Technologies studio of the Spring 2020 semester focused heavily on ideas of domesticity and “mass-customization” in their design investigations. Mass-customization is a term used to describe a change in business perception from a mass market to a mass-customized market. Products developed within a mass-customized market are often altered to fit an individual customer’s needs, leading to more effort placed into manufacturing and retail methods.
Trellis at Silo City
5/1/20
Willow Way aims to create a space for observing time and growth of both the site and structure by using architecture as the infrastructure for habitat and landscape.
Anachronistic Spaces
5/1/20
Through the design of Anachronistic Spaces, this thesis speculates on futures in the Great Lakes Region through a stance on Architecture that advocates for sensitivity towards a world often ignored or neglected in sedentary frameworks. Research into Nomadism reveals that many nomadic communities have long been cognizant of the relationships between resources, consumption, and environment. As a counterpoint to modern sedentary living, nomadic communities are a case study on resiliency and adaptation in the face of increasingly extreme climactic, political, economic, and social conditions.
Incubator
12/1/19
The Inclusive Design studio focused on developing a student oriented, small business incubator to foster creativity and entrepreneurism at UB. The designs were tailored to meet the needs of different “personas” for an imagined incubator design team through the use of inclusive strategies.
Resilience Hub
5/1/19
The junior studio followed the laufmaschine project (see page 128) by designing a Bicycle Institute / Resilience Hub / Community Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The site sits directly adjacent to the Superior Viaduct and the Lake Link bike trail.
Unoriginal Things
12/1/18
An investigation of the Broadway-Fillmore district, Foederer’s project for Unoriginal Things began with a simple observation. What was once a thriving working-class neighborhood with a dense housing fabric, had become irreparably changed through a sustained effort by the City of Buffalo to purchase derelict homes and subsequently demolish them.
Roots
12/1/18
The proposal, Roots, is a scheme to create a green gateway for the future Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, while also giving back to the surrounding Woodlawn Community.
Innovation District
12/1/18
The relationship between the water and the city, between water and people, and between water and architecture, is a critically important issue. In the BuffaloNiagara Region, it is now understood that the typical strategy of fortifying against the elements and creating barricades along the water has had catastrophic ecological, social, and cultural impacts. The junior’s semester-long investigation explored and reflected on the role of water in human settlement and new tectonic possibilities for living in and along the water’s edge.
Tectonics of Buoyancy
12/1/18
The relationship between the water and the city, between water and people, and between water and architecture, is a critically important issue. In the BuffaloNiagara Region, it is now understood that the typical strategy of fortifying against the elements and creating barricades along the water has had catastrophic ecological, social, and cultural impacts. The junior’s semester-long investigation explored and reflected on the role of water in human settlement and new tectonic possibilities for living in and along the water’s edge.
Strange Towns
12/1/18
On May 27, 1962, the coal seam that runs through the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, was ignited by the deliberate burning of trash at the Centralia landfill, located in the pit of a former strip mine. After two decades of unsuccessful attempts to put out the fire and remediate the site, the town was abandoned—bought out by the federal government, and its buildings subsequently demolished— leaving behind traces of an eroding street grid and an ever-dwindling number of residents that refused relocation. The fire— 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit at its core and advancing at a rate of 50-75 feet per year— still burns today and could continue to do so for another 250 years.
UB Cultural Campus in Madrid
12/1/18
The study abroad program in Spain had students design a UB Cultural Campus in Madrid. Due to the site’s position on the threshold of the urban fabric and the natural landscape of the university district, students had to navigate and understand the social, cultural, and built context of the city.
Sustainable Futures
12/1/18
Sustainable Futures is a summer semester abroad that offers students the opportunity to live and work in the rural but rapidly developing region of Monteverde, Costa Rica. This interdisciplinary service learning program brings undergraduate and graduate students from Architecture, Environmental Design, and Landscape Architecture into interdisciplinary teams to work on community-identified public projects.
A Home for C.R.A.P.
12/1/18
Through a series of introspective design exercises, students generated new designs by exploring the fragments of their architectural past that are omitted from the history they typically highlight in a polished portfolio of their best finished work. This studio was an opportunity for students to reflect on their architectural life thus far by unearthing and resuscitating forgotten, dismissed, or repressed experiences.
No. 2
12/1/18
No. 2 (Number 2) is a series of model studies of objects to induce comfort of homeless individuals on the streets. The project used HDPE plastic bags, with the title based on the RIC (Resin Identification Code) of the material and, at the same time, the essence of recycling.
A millimeter of space
12/1/18
The interface between the natural and human-made at a material surface suggests the formation of an ongoing process, in which the relationship between materials and the environment is displayed
Big to Small
12/1/18
A multi-faceted study of the telescope houses of the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, Big to Small is a collection of work from 13 graduate architecture students.
Amazing Grace
12/1/18
Natalie Harack’s Amazing Grace is an instrument, created by modifying a traditional shopping cart, that collects environmental data and physical artifacts. The objective of this project was to build an instrument to probe the site through inquiry, insight, and impression to develop a representation of environmental phenomena.
Pluvius
12/1/18
Imagined by the Situated Technologies Graduate Research Group, the installation utilizes sensing technologies to integrate sound, light, and motion, and acts as a means to investigate questions of spatial contingency and the limits of predictability through an interactive, multi-sensory experience.
Harrison Place
6/1/18
In Spring 2018, a multidisciplinary graduate studio in architecture and planning conducted a reuse study of the former Harrison Radiator facility, currently know as Harrison Place, located in Lockport, NY.
Coastal Dreams
6/1/18
Coastal Dreams is a speculative futures project, envisioning the cities along Lake Erie as subjected to extreme winter weather conditions in the face of global climate change. Sara Svisco developed a narrative, which depicts life in 2391, as the lake begins to experience alarmingly high water levels, resulting in the flooding of nearby coastal cities.
Logging
6/1/18
The research conducted in Logging investigates latent material possibilities within the medium of wood, by investigating material origins and the ethics of material consumption – two societal conditions that humans have increasingly become disconnected from.
Cages
6/1/18
The work in Cages explores the qualities of material boundaries and enclosing conditions that relate structure and skin, establishing critical connections between the natural and the artificial in the material experience.
Sugar Shell
11/27/17
By crystallization of sugar molecules bonding to the fibers of the bagasse, this pulp mixture, when lifted in the air, creates a solidified thin-shell structure. A spatial condition in which light penetrates through the thin paper shell thus creating a harmonious lighting effect that is only experienced from the interior.
Crushing Concrete
7/18/17
The slab (a beam stretched thin) is perhaps the most ubiquitous and yet under-appreciated of all structural elements. They are present in virtually all of our buildings as they form the floors upon which we walk and the ceilings and roofs just above our heads.