Projects and publications

Eliminating parking minimums can reduce unnecessary parking supply and encourage development constrained by excessive minimum requirements. Land use, location, and transportation demand initiatives affect the quantity of off-street parking supplied in response to market conditions. Our findings suggest mixed-use developers are likely to take advantage of the ability to provide less parking in highly accessible locations. Though many developers quickly pivot to the newfound possibilities of providing fewer parking spaces, others continue to meet earlier requirements. Cities of all types stand to benefit from undoing constraining parking policies of the past and allowing developers to transform parking lots to “higher uses.”

This course introduces students to the basic guidelines, standards, research methods, and documentation techniques used in historic preservation to identify and record historic structures and sites. These kinds of research techniques explored by students included the development of site descriptions, creating historical narratives, reviewing existing scholarly and/or professional literature, collecting primary and secondary data, developing skills in architectural photography, and understanding the basics of documenting and analyzing historic material fabric. The course makes use of lectures, discussions, and fieldwork to introduce the various ways in which preservationists document historic sites and resources.

This short film was created using the zoom interface by two students studying on different continents. Miguel Ortiz-Teed, working in Buffalo, and Yogesh Ravichandar, working in India, wanted to examine and express the specific difficulties of personal interaction in the video-conference environment.

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.

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.

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. 

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.  

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. 

Assistant professor of urban planning Ashima Krishna and Masters of Urban Planning graduate Enjoli Hall examine the conversion of former churches on the East Side of Buffalo as they are transformed into spaces for other faiths.