A call to action

An aerial view of Hayes Hall looking to the Buffalo Niagara region beyond, at sunset.

The challenges facing our world today – a warming planet, accelerating urbanization, and the largest forced uprooting of human populations since World War II among them – are not immovable. While all of humanity must act toward a better future, architects, urban planners and real estate developers can lead the way as advocates for new ways of thinking, making, building – and living.

Over the course of the 2019-20 academic year, we will document the school's formative years and evolution over five decades - stories that reveal both an enduring drive behind our program, and the persistence of questions facing our professions. At the same time, we look ahead through the eyes of our faculty, students and alumni, whose work challenges the boundaries of knowledge and conventions of practice.

What's your "plus"?

How are you pushing the "plus" of future practice in our disciplines? Tell us how for a chance to be featured on our "Be the Plus" blog. Contact Rachel Teaman, assistant dean for communications: rmansour@buffalo.edu 

Follow on social: #BethePlus

Our aim is to elevate ideas that both inform and challenge current public and professional dialogue, and catalyze partnerships for action.

            -   Dean Robert G. Shibley, School of Architecture and Planning

The founding principles of the school remain at the core of our mission: the pursuit of architecture, planning and real estate development as interdisciplinary problem-solving enterprises rooted in the needs of an increasingly diverse and complex urban world, animated by community of enterprising "makers" and "doers," and focused on research that transforms communities and the practice of our professions.

Our vision is to be a School of Architecture and Planning where the faculty, staff, and students inquire about and learn how to address the grand challenges facing our world today. In striving to shape our future we see architecture, planning and real estate development as professions that play a central role in the cultural and technological transformations to come. We will bring new ways of planning, designing, and making places where all life can thrive.