Spring 2025 studios offer diverse hands-on learning opportunities in architecture and urban planning

This Spring, our programs in architecture and urban planning have an exciting lineup of offerings, from a first-year architecture studio exploring materials and tectonics through small built prototypes to a Master of Urban Planning studio on manufacturing housing prospects for Buffalo’s Black Rock and Riverside neighborhoods.

The following takes a closer look at a selection of studios at the undergraduate and graduate level. Stay tuned to our Instagram throughout the semester as we cover the progression of their projects – and those of all studios. The results of our students’ hard work will be on full display during Final Reviews in May.

Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, UB associate professor of urban planning, and seniors in the BA in Environmental Design program will cap off their yearlong study of urban green infrastructure with an assessment of the tree canopy in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood of East Buffalo.

Working with community partners and in the field, students will inventory street trees and sidewalk conditions, provide policy and design ideas for increased tree cover, and even plant trees at select locations.

The studio will also consider other urban green infrastructure (UGI) conditions, from parks and community gardens to green roofs and habitat corridors. UGI refers to various types and sizes of human-managed and natural green and blue spaces that provide ecosystem services and solutions for cities, including stormwater management, biodiversity, urban food production and heat stress mitigation.

Boamah says the studio will focus on the potential for expanded tree cover and green infrastructure to improve health equity outcomes for Broadway-Fillmore as well as other disinvested neighborhoods in Buffalo and beyond.

“Often these inequities manifest through policies and practices that deprive communities of essential social-ecological needs, such as trees and other green infrastructure amenities,” says Boamah, whose teaching and research tackle health and other inequities embedded in the design of our built environment and institutional structures.

“This studio will serve as a space for students, instructors, and community members to reflect on the (historically contingent) drivers of these social-ecological needs and health inequities, particularly affecting communities of color, and to co-design interventions for transformative, healthy, and thriving communities.”

A critical first step is a precedent analysis of densely canopied streets in the Broadway-Fillmore corridor and associated socio-demographic and health conditions. The final report will assess tree species and current conditions throughout the neighborhood – data which will be used to update the city’s tree inventory. Proposed locations for tree plantings will suggest suitable species.

Boamah says the studio is a critical community-based planning experience for the undergraduate program, which prepares students for a range of fields in urban planning and development.

“Our planning studios are where tools, theories, and concepts converge with real-world needs in our communities, domestically and internationally,” he said. “We aim to propose design ideas as well as the planning and policy strategies needed for implementation. The ethos of this class is to plan and design with, not for, the people.”

First-year students in the BS in Architecture program will explore the iterative process of design as they transform sketches, models and drawings into small built prototypes.

Working individually and then as small teams, students will draw upon the studio format’s distinctive mode of peer learning to brainstorm and develop their projects. This year, a cohort of 125 freshmen work between the expansive Crosby Basement Studio and the Fabrication Workshop as they engage in collaborative learning, participate in weekly design crits and explore materials and tectonic assembly logics.

According to studio coordinator Stephanie Cramer, director of the School’s Fabrication Workshop and a clinical assistant professor of architecture, the first-year studio is a rite of passage of sorts for students and a crucial introduction to the range of architectural possibilities at every scale. Here, students develop a personal relationship with materials - their properties, their possibilities and their constraints.

"More importantly," says Cramer, "it shows students how, in the hands of a designer, materials can evoke emotion and instill meaning. The studio Architectural Alchemy asks students to combine everyday materials (wood, steel, and concrete) in a way which, like its namesake, yields something unexpected, yet wonderful."  

Conceiving architecture as a modular integration of function and material, student teams will develop small built prototypes through three basic prompts: a fragment of an infinite repeating system, a basic function, and two interdependent material systems. Teams will present their built prototypes mid-semester as a studio-wide exhibit in and around Crosby Hall. Transitioning back to individual work during the final weeks of the semester, students will design a pavilion capitalizing on lessons learned from team prototypes.

In addition to Cramer, the first-year teaching team consists of faculty members Albert Chao, Adam McCullough, Tim Noble, Jen Wisinski-Oakley and Jon Spielman. Teaching assistants: Ryan Bingham, Emily Bombardier, Tom Cuff, Julia Ferone, Jamie Jiang, Alec Lewis, Pouya Pakkhesal, Alli Presutti, Gianni Rinaudo, Josh Stolber.

One of several studios in the Master of Urban Planning program will prepare an affordable housing strategy for a focused area in the North Council District in Buffalo, which encompasses the Black Rock and Riverside neighborhoods in the city’s Northwestern corner.

Working under the direction of Ernie Sternberg, UB professor of urban planning, students will examine an emerging homeownership model with strong potential to close the affordable housing gap. Manufactured housing – or home units constructed primarily or entirely off-site – is estimated to cost less than half that of comparable stick-built, single-family detached homes due to flexible supply chains, regulatory consistency, and lower onsite construction costs.

Buffalo’s North District is among the more diverse but poorer parts of Buffalo, with a median income lower than that of the city as a whole. It is challenged by older, often dilapidated housing stock and storefront vacancies across its retail corridors. The studio will zero in on part of the North District – e.g., the Tonawanda Street corridor in Riverside – as a model for redevelopment across the district.

Students will build upon a 2020 MUP studio report also directed by Sternberg that explored the potential of manufacturing housing in cities more generally. Among its findings were that manufactured housing is most applicable in old, deindustrialized places that have proportionally more open land.

Sternberg says this studio could serve as a demonstration project for cities across New York State and the United States due to a lack of precedents for manufactured housing in urban areas and persistent stigmas around the housing type as “trailer homes.”  

Students will work closely with Buffalo City Council Member Joe Golombek (North District), Anne McCooey, director of the Black Rock Riverside Alliance, and other community leaders. The scope of study will also include identification of funding sources and potential partners.

Our 2024-25 Banham Fellow Tiffany Xu concludes her research and teaching with a graduate architecture studio exploring construction systems through studies in materiality and modernity.

Students will generate detailed drawings and models that imagine temporary structures set on the Buffalo region’s diverse waterways, including the Erie Canal in Tonawanda. Their work will be included in Xu’s culminating exhibition this Spring.

The studio is the final component of Xu’s two-part pedagogical project. Her Fall 2024 seminar invited students to explore architectural framing traditions and finish materials, as well as the structural, tactile, and perceptual effects of materiality and making.

According to Xu: “Buffalo’s 19th century formation can be described as a product of artificial water movement in response to emergent intercontinental markets—typical hallmarks of a modern industrial city.”

Framing the built environment as “transactions,” this option studio will examine themes of modernity such as infrastructure-scale earthwork, naturalization and control, and reconsider architecture as indexes and provocations of transaction – an event that is temporary rather than a monument that is fixed.

Through careful study of texts and precedents students will design architectures on an existing Buffalo water feature to foreground contingency and impermanence. Students will work with light timber framing, a nod to Tonawanda’s history as a major lumber port and an effort to familiarize students with a specifically American and pervasive tradition of construction. Design ideas will come to life through large-scale models and detailed drawings that represent tectonics and assembly (akin to industry shop drawings).