Projects and publications

Our faculty, researchers, and students engage in purposeful research that tackles complex societal challenges and generates transformational impacts both locally and globally.

Faculty research is catalyzed by diverse partnerships with public, nonprofit and private partners and prominent public, nonprofit and industry funding sources. Outcomes include peer-reviewed publications, books and evidence-based action in new plans, policies, designs, and programs in Buffalo and beyond. The breadth of our impact spans the fields of inclusive design, food systems planning, material and build systems development, and climate resilient design.   

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  • Giga Shed Urbanism
    8/1/21

    Reid Hetzel (MArch '21) was recognized with the Design Excellence Award for his thesis, a reimagining of Buffalo's Tesla Gigafactory as civic space,

  • Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore
    8/18/20

    Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.

  • Domesticity and Mass Customization
    5/1/20
    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. 
  • Trellis at Silo City
    5/1/20
    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.
  • 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.
  • Making Bibelot: Casting material research within cultural frameworks
    9/4/19

    Bibelot gives a detailed account of the entire process and the working assumptions behind a terra cotta installation built by the authors, which explores untapped potential material to expand design and manufacturing possibilities. The project also demonstrates how bridges could be built between practice and material research without sacrificing the cultural significance of architectural artifacts.

  • Terra cotta grotto
    3/20/19
    “Terra-Cotta Grotto” is a design intervention constructed with standard terracotta extrusions that explores the spatial, material, structural and ecological conditions of a grotto.
  • LIGHT/STATION
    2/1/18
    Chris Romano’s project Light/Station transformed an abandoned gas mart into a striking 1,545-square-foot design studio, green room and conference facility for Buffalo-based Torn Space, a critically acclaimed, avant-garde theater company.
  • Vertical line garden
    6/22/17
    Working with patterns, order, colour and density, this garden is a play on formal traditional gardens with contemporary ready-made means and hyper un-natural materials.
  • He, She, It
    9/26/15
    He, She & It is a collection of three distinct buildings for three different spatial needs, collaged into a single structure. The 1500 sq ft building houses work spaces for a painter, a ceramist/silversmith, and a greenhouse. Each space offers an atmosphere which differs radically from the others.
  • Church and Parish Center Santa Maria Assumpta
    9/1/15
    The project for the new Santa Maria Parish Center in Bonavista offers a specific solution to the needs of the program and the liturgy taking as a starting point two premises recurrent throughout the history of the Catholic Church: monumentality and mystery.
  • Radical Tectonics
    4/8/15
    The work in Radical Tectonics, by Annette LeCuyer champions the ingenuity of craft and the exploration of surface form and creative expression to set new benchmarks of spatial complexity for the twenty-first century
  • Steel and Beyond
    4/8/15

    Yesterday's standards and processes are rapidly becoming out-dated, and it is high time that the most recent advances are documented in a systematic overview by Annette LeCurey.

  • ETFE - Technology and Design
    4/8/15
    This book by professor Annette LeCuyer provides an introduction to the characteristics of ETFE and its applications in construction. It explores the specific characteristics of ETFE building skins in the areas of structural behavior, light transmission, insulation, acoustics, fire engineering and environmental modification.
  • Tipico Coffee (Cafe Fargo)
    2/27/15
    Café Fargo is a formerly neglected corner store converted into a small coffee shop in a residential neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. The former store, built in 1929, is a monolithic brick addition to the corner of a 3-story brick house built around 1880.
  • 2xMT
    5/31/13
    The research represented by project 2XmT has an underlining goal of producing self-structuring and lightweight architectural screens built entirely from thin-gauge sheet metal. Using only textured stainless steel, the research attempts to investigate the relationship between structure and appearance through performative analyses at full-scale.