Our Work

The 2020 Plan for the Village of Kenmore was developed in collaboration with municipal leaders and community members in the community located along the northern border of the City of Buffalo. The plan considers current issues being tackled in the village, the planning board’s goals for the future of Kenmore, as well as a broad idea about how village planning works in Kenmore.

This report was prepared by freshman and sophomore students from across UB in a seminar class taught by urban planning professor Ernest Sternberg. The purpose of the class was to involve students in the experience of conducting a real project for a real client. In this case, students worked with the Town of Amherst, represented by Town Supervisor Brian Kulpa and Margaret Winship, the town’s Director of Strategic Planning, to help envision a Central Park in relationship to a recently expanded and reorganized town park system. 

In the pursuit of creative and contemporary economic development strategies, a group of leaders in Western New York identified an innovation district (ID) as an important potential resource for our region. This term describes urban neighborhood-scale geographic places where a new economy combines high-tech businesses and institutions within a collaborative built environment that is conducive to living, working and playing. The original nomenclature was established by Julie Wagner and Bruce Katz as part of a series of Brookings Institute publications.

The Kaisertown Neighborhood Development Plan aims to strengthen this Buffalo neighborhood's existing assets through a series of improvements. The studio findings aim to promote social participation, economic development, main commercial corridors, and urban environment as well as raise awareness of Kaisertown within the region and the context of the Buffalo.

Students in this graduate preservation planning studio, directed by clinical associate professor of planning Kerry Traynor, completed an adaptive reuse proposal for a 19th-century barn located on the historic Richardson Olmsted Campus in Buffalo.

Cities grappling with limited supplies of high-quality, affordable homes are exploring alternatives in housing policy and form. This graduate-level studio in the Master of Urban Planning program explores the potential for manufactured housing in Buffalo and post-industrial cities more broadly.

A graduate-level studio directed by associate professor of urban planning Jiyoung Park, PhD, This study is focused on investigating economic development opportunities for four cities along the New York State I-90 corridor; Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. 

This graduate-level studio in the Master of Urban Planning program explores the Scajaquada Creek and its potential for development as a cultural and ecological asset for the City of Buffalo.

The Spring 2020 Inclusive Design studio, Playing Against Type, was a critique on the typological thinking present in western architecture. Assistant Professor Charles Davis encouraged students to examine the reuse of European-inspired developer housing by the material customs of Black life on Buffalo’s East Side. It is understood within these investigations that the typological diagram of a building emulates the function of the cultural potentials of “primitive” peoples against the standards and norms of European civilization. 

The sketches featured here were drawn after this course went completely remote. Before this transition class activities were dependent upon the freedom of movement and close inter-personal contact. Until this point the mode of interaction and learning was very direct and experiential.

Solitude Pavilion is located on the University at Buffalo’s South Campus between Hayes Hall and the Hayes B Annex. The project aims to create a nesting environment by combining two contrasting systems using terracotta as the primary material. 

Encompassing the period from about 1840-1900, Victorian architecture is characterized by a wide range of interpretations and re-combinations of distinctly different historical traditions. The evolution of Victorian architecture was spurred by many factors including the desire of building owners to create associations with past cultures and times, the role of builders (carpenters, masons, cabinetmakers, etc.) as designers, and the newly emergent technological capacities of industrial mass production.  

During the Junior Spring semester an integrated design studio is carried out and aimed toward incorporating various systems into a larger building tectonic. In the Spring of 2020, students designed a laufmachine, a self-propelled, two-wheeled vehicle; it is the 19th century predecessor to the bicycle. This portion of the semester prompted students to begin thinking about a multitude of systems within their designs through this construction process. 

The spring semester of 2020 for freshman architecture explored form in relation to the scale of the human body. This was done through examinations of scaled materials and the ways in which people interact with and sensorially respond to space. Students were encouraged to consider all construction scales as possessing the power to develop critical and influential architecture for those who interact with them.

This semester our Inclusive Design Graduate Research Group has been exploring the spatial implications of a community who inherited housing that was not developed with their needs in mind.

The Situated Technologies studio of the Spring 2020 semester focused heavily on ideas of domesticity and “mass-customization” in their design investigations. Mass-customization is a term used to describe a change in business perception from a mass market to a mass-customized market. Products developed within a mass-customized market are often altered to fit an individual customer’s needs, leading to more effort placed into manufacturing and retail methods. 

This study focused on investigating economic development opportunities for four cities along the New York State I-90 corridor: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. 

Willow Way aims to create a space for observing time and growth of both the site and structure by using architecture as the infrastructure for habitat and landscape.

This study is inspired by Lina Bo Bardi’s adaptive reuse project, SESC Pompeia Factory. The main factory building is comprised of a large open space ruled only by a rectilinear grid of columns. 

Through the design of Anachronistic Spaces, this thesis speculates on futures in the Great Lakes Region through a stance on Architecture that advocates for sensitivity towards a world often ignored or neglected in sedentary frameworks. Research into Nomadism reveals that many nomadic communities have long been cognizant of the relationships between resources, consumption, and environment. As a counterpoint to modern sedentary living, nomadic communities are a case study on resiliency and adaptation in the face of increasingly extreme climactic, political, economic, and social conditions. 

The affordability of housing has become a critical problem in most of the United States, especially in large, fast-growing cities where there are shortages of vacant land and housing. Post-industrial cities also face severe housing affordability problems due to population loss and deindustrialization, even though vacant land and abandoned houses are common. These “shrinking” or “legacy” cities face problems of low incomes, combined with surplus housing stock that has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer economical to rehabilitate it. The purpose of this report is to propose a unique opportunity for meeting the affordable housing needs of residents in post-industrial cities.

Students in the sophomore year in the Spring of 2020 made many explorations regarding site context. This approach was taken to help students understand how architecture achieves a sense of belonging in a given place, especially in an ever-evolving context.