School of Architecture and Planning welcomes largest cohort of new faculty in nearly a decade

Huet's current book project revisits the white cube as a quintessential modernist motif. White and cubical volumes are ubiquitous throughout the designs of avant-garde architects in the first half of the 20^th century. Historians and theorists made the white cube an emblem of European modernism, consistently associating this architectural formula with placelessness and machine-age aesthetics. Huet shifts this paradigm by recasting the modernist white cube as a product of regionalist inspiration and postcolonial agency in the transcultural Mediterranean. Based on new archival findings attesting to Adolf Loos, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier’s extensive Mediterranean travels, she argues that these modernists appropriated key features of Greek island villages and North African medinas to formulate their white and cubical designs. Measuring these architects’ primitivist vision of vernacular against the discourses of dissident Mediterranean figures, she demonstrates that celebrated designers, unnamed builders, scholars of the built environment, and social housing residents formulated contesting definitions of this architectural motif.

Huet's teaching invites students to approach architectural designs as ideologically charged objects emerging from networks of transregional exchanges. Courses she offers include “Colonialism and Its Subversion: Architectural Modernism in North Africa,” “Le Corbusier Beyond Europe: Internationalism and Ideology,” and “Architectural History 2: Modernity and Its Other.”

Within the field of computational design, Khodadadi studies the early phases of design and qualitative and quantitative assessments of design alternatives, from building form to parametric design. In the building sciences, her inquiries include thermal and daylighting simulations and structural and environmental analyses of buildings. In the studio and classroom, she cultivates inclusive teaching and active learning approaches through student-supportive learning outcomes and open access learning materials.

She received her doctorate in architecture (building technology) from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation developed a computational form exploration method using the principles of creative and productive thinking and the application of a genetic algorithm (GA) and the Theory of Innovative Problem Solving (TRIZ).

Prior to joining UB, she taught building tectonics and structures and design studios at Portland State University. She earned her Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran after which she practiced for several years in Tehran as a registered architect.

Her work examines social inequalities in the built environment, spotlighting the ways in which groups and individuals fight for more inclusive cities through the intersection of bottom-up tactics and official policies. In Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (Cornell University Press, 2016), she investigates how Berlin residents appropriated architectural decay to engage a difficult past, resist gentrification, and create alternative housing and cultural spaces. The book was awarded Antoinette Forrester-Downing Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2019.

Her forthcoming book will be the first city-wide study of grassroots urbanism and inclusive city-making in São Paulo, Brazil. Her peer-reviewed articles and book chapters have dealt with themes such as public space and social inclusion in São Paulo; the historiography of Brazilian modernism; war trauma, memory, and memorials in Germany; and alternative approaches to preservation. Sandler’s teaching focuses on these topics from a global perspective, spanning the topics of colonialism, gender and race, health, preservation, and food.

Sandler was also appointed by Dean Robert G. Shibley as associate dean for inclusive excellence, leading the School of Architecture and Planning’s efforts to further inclusion, equity, and justice across our School and in the teaching, research and practice of architecture, urban planning and real estate development.

Sowell has published research about flood mitigation in cities, propagation technologies, and energy landscapes in the Journal of Architectural Education, Thresholds, and Bracket, respectively. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Pan American Biennale (with Nichole Wiedemann), with awards from Cleveland’s Urban Design Collaborative, Brasilia’s Secretary of Housing, the Texas Society of Architects and the Environmental Design Research Association.

At The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught prior to joining UB, Sowell directed the Master of Landscape Architecture Program, led landscape studios about cemeteries as resilient urban infrastructures, and received the 2010 CELA National Excellence in Design Studio Teaching Award. He is a principal of SSAU (with Kristine Stiphany), a studio focused on creating socially-oriented interactions between landscape and architecture.

Stiphany’s research is guided by a commitment to developing technologies and frameworks for addressing inequalities in contemporary urban design and transformation, with a focus on the role of community-based data infrastructures in Brazil and along the U.S. Mexico border.

A registered architect, member of the AIA and former planner for ‘slum upgrading’ projects in São Paulo, Stiphany is known for uniting large transdisciplinary teams to develop participatory planning and design tools for communities. The work was the focus of her National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, where she founded the Chapa Civic Data Lab. Stiphany will advance this work at UB as director of the Design for Resilient Environments Lab (DRE-Lab), a subsidiary of Chapa focused on co-producing urban regeneration in climate and capital-vulnerable places. She is also the co-chair of the Latin American Housing Network.

Prior to her doctoral work, Stiphany worked at Studio Gang in Chicago with design awards for projects in Austin, Brasilia, and São Paulo. Her work is published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Latin American Research Review, and Urban Studies. In addition to her PhD, she holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan.

Stiphany, who teaches graduate housing studios at UB and brings professional and scholarly expertise in both architecture and urban planning, has also been appointed Director of the dual Master of Architecture / Master of Urban Planning degree program at the School of Architecture and Planning.

She holds a BPS in Architecture from UB and a MArch from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Chow is dedicated to the design profession and larger community, serving on the AIA Buffalo/WNY Diversity Committee and Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation Design Review Committee.

In her professional development role, she serves as faculty advisor for the American Institute of Architecture for Students while cultivating mentorship, internship, employment and scholarship/competition opportunities. Chow has practiced internationally, including Shanghai, China, where she worked on large-scale commercial and mixed-use projects with zerolaboffice. Her private practice, proj.eyc, specializes in retail and residential design with sustainability/Net-Zero and modern design aesthetics, receiving the 2021 AIA Buffalo/WNY Design Award for the 4+2 House in Medina, NY.

In 2016, her built prototype tiny house was showcased at the National Tiny House Jamboree, a gathering of over 60,000 people in Colorado Springs.

As an educator she has been a guest workshop facilitator for Tiny Houses and the Future of Energy at the Global Student Leaders Summit in Reykjavik, Iceland (2016) and has held teaching positions at Boston Architectural College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC®), Lubniewski is passionate about resilient, high-performance housing for the masses. An NCARB Certified architect, she has held positions with Wendel Companies and eco_logic STUDIO in Buffalo and serves as the AIA Buffalo/WNY Emerging Professionals Committee Chair. In addition to her UB degree, she holds a MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He previously served as an Inclusive Design Fellow and Instructional Teaching Fellow at the Yale School of Architecture and as a Public Interest Design Fellow at the University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development. Thibodeaux holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Texas and a post-professional Master of Architecture from Yale University, where he received the Moulton Andrus Award for excellence in art and architecture. He is a licensed architect and directs a small independent practice alongside his work as co-director of Kingfish, a project space on Buffalo's West Side.

As director of UB’s SMART Fabrication Factory, Vrana partners with faculty and industry to advance practice-driven research in fabrication and digital craft.

A graduate of UB’s BS Arch and MArch programs, Vrana has advanced research since his days as a student, when he served on the award-winning team for Project 2xMT, an experimental prototype toward self-structuring and lightweight architectural screens built entirely from thin-gauge sheet metal.He also has prior experience as a member of the Rigidized Metals Research Group, advancing fabrication methods with the Buffalo-based manufacturer of architectural metals. Today, his teaching and research engages students, faculty and industry in digital design, visualization, fabrication, and construction. 

Nelischer recently completed her PhD in planning at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation offered a case study of Sidewalk Toronto, a former public-private partnership between Sidewalk Labs (an Alphabet Inc. subsidiary) and Waterfront Toronto (a tripartite government agency) to develop a smart city.

She was awarded the Van Ginkel Graduate Fellowship from the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance for her doctoral research. Nelischer holds over a decade of professional experience in planning, including designing community participation processes for the City of Toronto and launching the City of Brampton’s first Office of Community Engagement.

Previously, she served on the faculty of the University of Waterloo, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the University of Toronto, where she also served as assistant dean for academic planning and governance.

Nelischer holds a master’s degree in design writing criticism from the University of the Arts London and a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Guelph.