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

Project sort

Topics

Fabrication and Construction
Sustainability-Ecology (1)
Materials (1)

Degrees

Graduate Research Group (GRG)

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unité de Révolution
11/27/17
At a time of sociopolitical unrest, citizens are involved in demonstrations with increasingly spatial qualities, harnessing a legitimized right to the city. The Origam[we] shield system, delivered in the form of appropriable DIY manuals, challenges institutional reproductions of power in political, professional, and pedagogical approaches to the design and construction of our environments.
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.
Investigating Flexibility
11/25/17
Black walnut has high strength when bent, and can easily be manipulated without saturation. Students investigate various species of wood to identify a workable balance of flexibility and strength. Layers, cut into 1/8" thickness, are laminated to create the spine and ribs of the boat form under development.
Form Making
10/4/17
This explores one of the many form-making strategies to produce a light, thin shell structure. Fabric is held in a delicate balance of tension and compression forces, stretching out to create a field condition rather than a solitary object in space. The soft fabric essentially floats above the ground, just barely suspended in place.
Junior Studio: Review
7/18/17
A boat is a vessel for transport by water - constructed to provide buoyancy by excluding water and shaped to give stability and permit propulsion. Throughout history boats have been instrumental in the development of civilization, affording humanity greater mobility than travel over land, whether for trade, transport, warfare, and the capacity for fishing.
Study Abroad: Costa Rica
7/18/17
Sustainable Futures is a ten week course open to graduate students in architecture, landscape architecture and planning programs, and also by arrangement to students entering their fourth or fifth year of related programs.
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.
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