New architecture faculty members include prominent designers, alums

Including visiting professors, faculty fellows and adjunct faculty - many of whom are alumni of the school - the class of faculty will provide support for studios, seminars and core and elective courses.    

Seth Amman is the founder of Arch&Type, a Buffalo-based architecture and development practice. He is a licensed architect with a commitment to revitalizing cities. Living out his strong conviction that everyone deserves future-focused innovative design, Amman advises the boards of the Allentown Association and Vision Niagara, two neighborhood-centered non-profits, alongside his professional work. His skills have cohered the vision of award-winning projects from coffee shops, entertainment venues, homes, and a linear park, merging historic reference with contemporary distinction. Amman will serve as part of the sophomore architecture studio teaching team. He holds an MArch (2006) and Architecture BS (2004) from UB.

Randy Fernando is an emerging designer and artist, focusing on work that synergizes neuroscience, sociological behavior, and architecture. He is a recent graduate of UB's MArch (2018) and Architecture BS (2016) programs. He joins the faculty team for junior studio. He has experience working as an architectural designer at NYC based firm, Heitler Houstoun Architects. Fernando’s newly founded practice, MOV.E, promotes research that tackles a variety of social, cultural, and political topics through design-build initiatives, including the recent installation Ocean Cube, an immersive deep-sea exhibition that resonates with issues of sustainability in the ocean environment.   

Achitectural designer, educator, and researcher Emily Kutil joins us as our 2019-20 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow. She is a founding member of We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective, an interdisciplinary collaboration between community activists, academics, and designers mapping geographies of austerity in Detroit. Her research investigates the intertwined social structures, physical structures, and power structures that shape our world. She makes drawings, publications, installations, models, and other story-machines, often using collective, interdisciplinary processes. As this year's Reyner Banham Fellow, she’ll focus on the history and future of water, land, power, and life in the Great Lakes Watershed.

Ann Lui, AIA, is visiting assistant professor of architecture at UB and founding principal of Future Firm, a Chicago-based architecture and design research practice. Future Firm designs spaces, big and small, for people to come together in new ways: from pop-up exhibition spaces, to residential and commercial buildings, to urban and territorial speculations. She was co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 titled Dimensions of Citizenship. She co-edited, with Gediminas Urbonas, of Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT/SA+P Press, 2015) on aesthetic and spatial practices in the civic realm. Currently, Lui organizes The Night Gallery, a nocturnal exhibition space on Chicago's south side, which features video and film works by artists and architects from sunset to sunrise. She was recently named Newcity’s “Designer of the Moment” and Crain’s “40 Under 40.”  

Cam Parkin is adjunct professor of architecture at UB. He also currently teaches at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where he serves as a research associate for Waterloo Architecture’s DATAlab. Parkin's research focuses on the representation of complex field conditions through data-driven, computationally generated drawings and models, with a specific interest in ecological systems in urban environments. At UB he will teach advanced digital design and representation for graduate students in architecture. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Laura Schmitz works at eco-logic STUDIO, a small architecture firm in Buffalo that specializes in small-scale, local, high-performance building design. She will co-teach ARC 605 with professor Kenneth Mackay. Schmitz holds an Architecture BS from UB (2011) and a Master of Architecture (2015) from MIT. Her passion for low-tech vernacular occupant-built housing led her to work at some non-traditional companies including Earthship Biotecture and Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Her built prototype design was displayed at the National Tiny House Jamboree, a gathering of over 60,000 people in Colorado Springs. She has also held teaching positions at Boston Architectural College and MIT.

Sara Svisco, a graduate of UB's Master of Architecture (2019) and Architectue BS (2017) programs, joins the architecture faculty as part of the freshman studio teaching team. She recently was hired by CPL, a Rochester-based architecture, engineering and planning firm. As an architectural designer for CPL, Svisco provides architectural planning and design solutions for a variety of project types. Svisco also served as an architectural intern for three years at CPL.

Joey Swerdlin is co-founder of Group Project, an architecture and urban planning collaborative that works with socially-minded nonprofits to transform vacant buildings into productive spaces for their communities. He is also Community Director of The Morpholio Project, where he manages brand identity and a range of applications that connect digital and analog methods of designing. He joins UB's architecture faculty as an adjunct professor and part of the sophomore studio teaching team. Swerdlin holds an Architecture BS from UB (2013) and a MArch from MIT. He has worked for architectural practices including Storefront for Art and Architecture, Ants of the Prairie/Joyce Hwang, CLOG and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen.