Intersight Journal of Student Work

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.

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.

This study focused on investigating economic development opportunities for four cities along the New York State I-90 corridor: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. 

This study is inspired by Lina Bo Bardi’s adaptive reuse project, SESC Pompeia Factory. The main factory building is comprised of a large open space ruled only by a rectilinear grid of columns. 

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. 

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. 

The affordability of housing has become a critical problem in most of the United States, especially in large, fast-growing cities where there are shortages of vacant land and housing. Post-industrial cities also face severe housing affordability problems due to population loss and deindustrialization, even though vacant land and abandoned houses are common. These “shrinking” or “legacy” cities face problems of low incomes, combined with surplus housing stock that has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer economical to rehabilitate it. The purpose of this report is to propose a unique opportunity for meeting the affordable housing needs of residents in post-industrial cities.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 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. 

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.