With a focus on resilience and adaptability challenges for rethinking campus environments at large, the panel explored emerging practices, limits, contradictions, and possibilities of designing for resilience.

The panelists included:

• Salmaan Craig, ENG.D. – associate professor, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
• Felix Heisel, INTL, ASSOC. AIA – assistant professor and director of the Circular Construction Lab, Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
• Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture, associate professor of urban studies and planning, MIT
• Karen M’Closkey, ASLA, RLA – professor of landscape architecture and co-founder of the Environmental Modeling Lab, University of Pennsylvania
• Kiel Moe, MAIA, FAAR – architect, author, and forest-building ecologist
• Erkin Özay, AIA – chair, associate professor, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo
• Kristine Stiphany, PhD, AIA – assistant professor, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo
• Charles Waldheim, AIA, ASLA (Hon.), FAAR – director, Office for Urbanization and professor of landscape architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design

The discussion was moderated by:

• Julia Czerniak, AIA ASSOC., ASLA, RLA – dean and professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo
• Nina-Marie Lister, MCIP, RPP, Hon. ASLA – professor, School of Urban Planning, Toronto Metropolitan University

Launched in fall 2025, the Resilient Campus Competition invited architects, landscape architects, planners, and allied design professionals from around the world to boldly envision UB’s South Campus as a socio-ecologically integrated landscape capable of responding to the complex challenges posed by climate change.

Seven multidisciplinary teams from around the globe were selected to participate in the competition. Their work was subsequently displayed on UB’s South Campus as well as a traveling exhibition that included the Aedes Gallery in Berlin. A forthcoming publication will serve as the final phase of the project.

Reflecting and building on the ideas put forth by the competition, the panel members engaged in a discussion centered around the following question: What do the seven competition proposals, viewed through our different disciplinary lenses, reveal about the emerging practices, limits, contradictions, and possibilities of designing for resilience?

Resilience—as defined in the competition brief—is a complex socio-ecological system’s ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from—and, if necessary, transform in the wake of—shocks and disturbances. The conversation highlighted valuable lessons for academia and professional practice alike, while also identifying promising ideas that offer optimism about the future of resilient design.

Several recurring themes stood out to the panelists as promising directions for the future of resilient design. Across multiple entries, teams emphasized restoring biodiversity, adapting and reusing existing buildings rather than constructing new ones, salvaging and reusing building materials instead of defaulting to demolition, and critically examining the origins and impacts of the materials used in construction.

“For me, maybe the most heartening aspect of that is this turn toward the biogenic,” Waldheim shared. “Architects are increasingly concerned about where their materials come from, the carbon and labor implications of that extractive process, and how we might think about growing our building materials.” Noting that UB’s South Campus isn’t nearly large enough to actually “grow a new building,” he was, nevertheless, encouraged to see architects exploring alternatives to extraction.

M’Closkey observed that many proposals envisioned the campus as a living laboratory for studying long-term forest change and ecological restoration. “What I appreciated about putting the campus in a much broader regional context in terms of trying to build back biodiversity is it would radically change what this campus is,” she offered. “Actually operationalizing that would be quite a challenge for a campus but a really good one to take on.”

The School’s request for proposals had encouraged teams to visualize resilience as a dynamic, iterative process through modeling, scenario planning, and data-driven storytelling, as opposed to rigid master plans. The panel touted the benefits of utilizing if-then scenario planning—an approach endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—to imagine ways to respond to a range of climate futures, and they wished the teams had pushed the envelope further.

“Scenarios are a way to imagine new worlds and create new contexts through which interactions of new relationships between the past, present, and future, but also in transgeographic terms,” Stiphany pointed out. “We've talked about references to the past, but many of our references for what architecture should be and what resilience should look like come from Global Northern contexts, when many of the most sustainable and resilient practices occur in global southern ones.”

Moe highlighted moving from today’s prevalent “take-make-break” paradigm to a “tend-and-mend” approach. “I think the world is really built out,” he noted. “We are inheriting a used planet, sometimes a broken planet, and I think it makes more sense to look at that closely, tend it and mend it, rather than continually tear it down, rebuilt it, and make the same mistakes again, kicking the can down the road to another generation.”

The panel discussed a multitude a ways to do just that: designing not just with construction in mind but also plans for thoughtful deconstruction at the end of the building’s life; prioritizing minimal and skillful building interventions (like harnessing thermal buoyancy) before designing new systems; considering the resilience of the forests from which timber is sourced; and optimizing existing structures rather than simply tearing them down and building new ones. Together, these strategies pointed toward a more resource-conscious and ecologically informed approach to resilient design.

Drawing on their experiences as educators, several panelists reflected on what the competition suggested for the future of architectural and planning education. 

Moe encouraged educators to create more opportunities for students to engage directly with the built and natural environments. Whether walking through a forest, studying a building well suited for adaptive reuse, or examining one that has reached the end of its life cycle, he argued that firsthand experience remains essential to developing a deeper understanding of resilience and stewardship.

“I’m terrified of making a generation of screen workers who don’t know those basic things,” he warned. “It’s ultimately on all of us to insist and raise the level of discourse, raise the literacy, hold practices and clients accountable, and avoid simple greenwashing narratives.”

The conversation also turned to the role institutions themselves must play in advancing resilient design. The competition proposals presented many ambitious ideas, and the panelists acknowledged the practical challenges that universities would face in bringing such visions to life. “There were assumptions that the institution can coordinate systems, revise its priorities, and maybe more importantly, act coherently over decades,” Özay explained. “Universities would need to adapt.”

To spur change, Moe also urged, “We need a new code, new legislation, a new society and aesthetic understanding of what buildings are. I think the campus can be that.” 

The panel noted that the architectural profession often relies on familiar methods of creating value and solving problems, sometimes moving too quickly toward generic solutions rather than fully exploring the conditions and uncertainties that shape them.

As Mazereeuw mentioned, “What I loved about the projects is they’re very optimistic. What I didn’t like about the projects is that they’re very optimistic. The work that we do in building community resilience is much more dire.”

Craig encourages practitioners to spend more time working through scenarios of design for the standard deviation. “What I mean by that is we're leaving the Holocene. There is no longer this steady baseline of repeatable seasons, and suddenly everything's more stochastic. And the storm or the heat wave that is projected in 2080 could all just easily happen next year. So, it's that stochasticity that we suddenly have to think about and conceptualize.”

In the post-talk Q&A, an audience member brought up an important point regarding the relationship between resilience, ecological stewardship, and vulnerable communities, particularly Indigenous populations. In response, Lister emphasized the need for practitioners to consider how systems of extraction affect not only natural environments but also the communities and species most vulnerable to those impacts. “We see a little glimmer of coexistence narratives between humans and other species,” she observed. “We see conversations about collaborative co-design with vulnerable communities, but then the image-making still resorts back to the one we know.”

Moe added that architects and planners have much to learn from native populations, especially when it comes to understanding living ecological systems and humanity’s relationship to them. 

While much of the discussion focused on the challenges of designing for an uncertain future, the panels each ended on a positive note, identifying reasons for optimism.

While the increasingly visible impacts of our evolving climate are certainly cause for alarm, Craig pointed to it as a potential catalyst for action. “The fact that it’s becoming tangible is, I think, a course for hope because suddenly the effects are more salient and difficult to ignore.”

The important role that policy, building codes, and regulation plays in advancing resilient design practices was also highlighted. Changes in these areas can encourage institutions and developers to embrace new approaches that might otherwise struggle to gain traction. Heisel cited recent developments that signal progress in this direction, noting that the International Code Council has approved an amendment allowing the structural reuse of salvaged lumber, and New York State has a similar bill on the docket right now.

For Moe, however, the greatest source of hope lies with the next generation of designers. “They come to schools of architecture with amazing motivation and hope, whether or not our curricula, faculty, and activities are fully supporting that, or whether we're really co-learning about what these coming decades are going to look like,” he shared. “Please keep at it. I trust your instincts, and we'll continue to try to keep up with you.”