UB Welcomes International Students to Turn Demolition Waste into Design Innovation

For a week in October, the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning welcomed a group of 14 undergraduate architecture students from Mexico (3rd and 4th year) to be in residence here in Buffalo. This group engaged with the city of Buffalo, our unique facilities, and advanced manufacturing equipment — introducing students to hands-on, material, and computationally driven research areas. Proclaimed “TEC Week in Buffalo” by Romano, this program was a labor of love, resulting in a truly collaborative effort and experience.

The week kicked off with a tour of the Buffalo AKG art museum, followed by an introduction to repurposing material held in Parker Hall on UB’s South Campus. After an opening welcome from Chair of the Department of Architecture, Erkin Özay, the visiting students were provided with an introduction to our Fabrication Workshop (and safety procedures) by Director of the Fabrication Workshop and Clinical Assistant Professor, Stephanie Cramer. Chaussabel then provided an overview of her workshop “Trash to Table: Digital Fabrication Methods for Designing with Demolition Waste,” where the objective would be to work creatively within the constraints of digital fabrication tools (CNC routing and water jet cutting) to test new possibilities for reusing building materials.

Students were broken into four groups, which were then assigned an object and a digital fabrication machine and method. Chaussabel challenged the students with the following context: Why do we reuse materials? How are architects currently engaging in the circular economy? What role do narratives and aesthetics play in reuse? How is digital fabrication and visualization currently being used in the circular economy (3D scanning, AR, VR), and what are its other potentials?

Throughout the week, students worked to turn these “trash” objects into tables. “Hearing the student’s perspectives about what they wanted to design — really getting their design interests or their views on what these objects should become was the best part of this experience,” says Chaussabel. "We started with things like a sink or a bathtub, and to some people it brought about a childhood reaction. It was fun getting to know the student’s personalities through how they interpreted the objects.” As the 2025-26 Banham Fellow, Chaussabel says this will tie into the work she’s doing for her final fellowship project.

The first group cut a large slice out of a cast iron and enamel tub to make their table, the second group used the waterjet to cut a marble piece into smaller parts with slots, group three milled into the top of their found wood form, and group four turned halves of a sink into a table. Mid-week, Dean Julia Czerniak stopped in for a design consultation. In addition to the discarded object, more standard building materials such as 2x4 lumber, scrap sheet metal, 1.5" steel angle, all-thread, scrap EPS foam, 3/4” plywood, and more were available to the students.

 “Our school doesn't really have all of the machines and tools that UB has, so it's been really cool to see what kind of level the models of architecture can get,” said visiting student, Mariana Gastelum Diaz. “We didn't know what our piece of ‘trash’ was before, but we think it was some sort of theater prop. It was spray-painted silver, so we were thinking it was a part of a stage set, but we made it into a table. We were the only team working with wood, everyone else was working with the water jet.”

When asked what she’ll take back home after this experience, Diaz said “Celia is really good with design, especially with furniture, which I haven’t really done before. To see a different point of view of design, along with the experience the teachers here gave us, that’s the main thing that I’m going to be taking with me.” 

As the architectural discipline grapples with its role in resource depletion, carbon emissions, and waste generation, there is a growing urgency to stop sourcing new materials and to reuse materials from existing buildings instead. One challenge to integrating reused materials into current building practices is technical: the process of inventorying, de-constructing, and re-processing reused materials for their second life is currently less efficient than their new counterparts.

Another challenge is cultural perceptions around waste: building materials are automatically considered waste after a single use, to be downcycled or disposed of in a landfill after just one life. Apart from materials that have historical significance or are expensive to source new, typically there is little value seen in saving building materials.

Chaussabel’s workshop challenged us to consider another type of value — the ability for reused materials to produce narratives. “When an object is dislodged from one place and ‘mis-used’ in another context, the ‘mis-use’ makes visible that the object used to belong somewhere else,” said Chaussabel. 

Julia Hunt, director of digital fabrication and clinical assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, shared that “This week has been a really exciting test for our machines, and myself, because the students were working with really weird objects. The exploratory aspect of working with these physical things, and the fact that the students got engaged really quickly, has led to some cool projects. This is the second year we’ve hosted students from TEC and it’s always a very fun group.”

Outside of the workshop, students took part in various cultural experiences throughout the week, including a walking tour of the residential neighborhood Parkside, downtown Buffalo, and downtown Rochester; visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House and Torn Space Theater; explored Allentown Historic District and Silo City; and had an architecture tour of First Unitarian Church of Rochester led by Architect Louis I. Kahn.

The 4-day workshop that was conducted as part of the academic programming was co-led by Romano and Chaussabel, with assistance from Hunt who contributed significantly to the project’s execution. Additional partners on this exciting initiative were UB Architecture faculty members Steph Cramer, Greg Serweta, Greg Delaney, Elaine Chow, Miguel Guitart, Jin Young Song, Erkin Özay, Julia Czerniak, Mauro Cringoli and Lukas Fetzko (alumni), as well as historian Bill Fugate and Paul Lang, managing principal of CarminaWood Design.