Our Work

Explore the scholarly, curricular and creative work of our faculty and students as we mobilize our disciplines on today's most pressing societal challenges. Through studios, sponsored and independent research, faculty and students across our programs engage with real-world projects that reimagine our built environment, innovate modes of practice and transform communities both locally and globally.

Our approach to research

Intersight, our journal of student work

Housing

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  • Winners of senior architecture housing studio announced
    2/1/22
    The 2021 senior architecture "Housing as Process" design studio focused on housing-led, mixed-use development programs that build on social capital in the community. It is the culminating studio of the BS in Architecture program, with the final review organized as a competition judged by a blind panel of jurors. The winning teams are each awarded a $2,500 prize.
  • Urban Life: Self + Society
    12/1/20
    In the Fall of 2020, students in the Senior class designed multiple-unit housing within the Bedford Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn, New York. The semester focused on the urban dwelling as a threshold between self and society, between local and global, and between nature and culture. This project aimed to develop connections in the student’s mind about context and developing systems of housing that would relate to a greater social, technical, cultural, political, and economic understanding of urban space.
  • People & Place
    12/1/20
    Willert Park Courts (WPC), known today as A.D. Price Homes, is currently a vacant residential housing complex made up of ten buildings located in the Ellicott District of the east side of Buffalo, New York.
  • Near-Term Strategies for the Northland Campus
    12/1/20
    For decades, the area around Northland Avenue suffered from divestment and abandonment, especially as many of its former manufacturing anchors succumbed to outside economic forces. Due to the adjacent Belt Line railroad, the corridor had become a strategic industrial hub able to move both people and products en masse. Once home to manufacturers such as Houdaille Industries, Otis Elevator Company, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, Northland Rubber Company, and Niagara Machine & Tool Works (later Clearing Niagara), the products that left the loading docks went on to forge modern America. A blue-collar workforce, building aircraft engines, plunger elevators, and automobile parts, established residency near their employers starting around the turn of the 20th Century. Over time, this pattern of settlement formed the Delavan Grider neighborhood we know today.
  • Should architecturally significant low-income housing be preserved?
    7/9/20

    The recent demolition of the Paul Rudolph-designed Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, NY, highlights one of the key tensions of preserving modern architecture: how to balance the needs of occupants with historically significant designs.

  • Playing Against Type
    5/1/20
    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. 
  • Manufactured Housing
    5/1/20
    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.
  • Daniel Hess explores the legacy of central planning in Baltic States
    11/5/19
    State-sponsored housing projects dating back to the socialist era are a ubiquitous presence across Eastern Europe, particularly in the Baltic Countries. Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries , the latest book edited by Daniel B. Hess, UB professor and chairperson of urban planning, focuses on the formation and later socio-spatial trajectories of such projects in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
  • Sun_Food_Water design prototype
    10/29/19
    Affordability is defined based on monthly costs, with reductions for incorporating solar gain & PV-generated energy, water collection, and food production. 
  • Senior citizen cooperative housing Masten Park
    10/29/19
    These projects were part of a larger studio examining models for infill housing within two Buffalo neighborhoods, one of which was the Masten District.
  • Health hostel design prototype
    10/29/19
    Health Hostel provides temporary housing for those that may have just finished medical treatment of some sort or just need help navigating daily life activities.
  • Care house design prototype
    10/29/19
    The conceptual design developed by Alexa Russo, student, working with architecture professor Edward Steinfeld. The model was built in Spring 2018 by clinical assistant instructor Stephanie Cramer’s fourteen inclusive design students.
  • Buffalo Turning the Corner
    6/26/19
    Professors of urban planning Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Robert Silverman join associate professor of urban planning Li Yin collaborated on the Buffalo Turning The Corner Initiative through the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies.
  • Affordable House(s) Show
    5/14/19

    Tuesday, May 14, 2019

    See student concepts in affordable housing developed under the direction of Brad Wales and the architecture program's Small Built Works program. Presented in partnership with PUSH Buffalo.

  • Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda
    10/15/18
    Korydon Smith, Tomà Berlanda and colleagues explore the pressing challenges and opportunities to be found in planning, designing, and constructing a healthy, equitable, and sustainable city. 
  • The Impact of Single-Family Rental REITs on Regional Housing Markets
    9/5/18
    Urban planning professor Robert Silverman, PhD student Chihuangji Wang and collaborators examine the socio–spatial distribution of properties in single family home (SFR) real estate investment trusts (REIT) portfolios to determine if SFR REIT properties tend to cluster in distinct areas.
  • Bailey Green Design Prototypes
    5/16/18
    This studio, led by clinical assistant instructor of architecture Stephanie Cramer instructor worked with urban planning professor Hiroaki Hata’s neighborhood master plan to design homes that fitted the area’s narrow 30-foot lots.
  • The UB Affordable Housing Symposium
    4/10/18

    April 10, 2018

    Explore current conditions and future trends in housing policy, design and finance, and consider new models for high-quality, affordable housing.

  • Housing Estates in Europe
    1/1/18
    Daniel B. Hess and collaborators explore the formation and socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in Europe. 
  • Examining real estate investment impacts on housing affordability and equity
    12/1/17

    Urban planning professor Robert Silverman, in collaboration with Ken Chilton of the Department of Public Administration, Tennessee State University, are investigating the effects of single-family home real estate investment trusts (REITs) on regional housing markets, specifically in Nashville, TN. 

  • Planning for the Health and Social Inclusion of LGBT Older Adults
    10/9/17
    While lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender older adults have a range of lived experiences, many grew up during a time when homosexuality and gender variance was denounced and criminalized.
  • Build as you Earn and Learn
    9/1/17
    Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, and Clifford Amoako explore informal housing dynamics in Kumasi, Ghana.
  • Siting Affordable Housing in Opportunity Neighborhoods
    4/30/17
    Professor and associate professor of urban planning Robert Silverman and Li Yin along with associate professor of social work Kelly Patterson examine the content and structure of the new affirmatively furthering fair housing mapping tool (AFFH-T) developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as part of its new assessment of fair housing (AFH) process.
  • Rehab projects: 120 Summit Ave & 320 Florida Ave
    10/12/16
    Working in close collaboration with the Buffalo Chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Professor Edward Steinfeld’s studio developed proposals for new-build homes to be assembled by Habitat volunteers.