Intersight 22

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The School of Architecture and Planning University at Buffalo The State University of New York 125 Hayes Hall Buffalo, NY 14214-8030 www.ap.buffalo.edu www.ap.buffalo.edu/publications Intersight is an annual publication that highlights the work of the students at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo. The intent of this journal is to record and discuss current academic and cultural activities of the school. This issue includes coursework completed throughout the academic year of 2019.

All photographs and drawings are courtesy of the Visual Resources Center, contributors, and students unless otherwise noted. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent volumes. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except for copying permitted by section 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press. Every effort has been made to see that no inaccurate or misleading data, opinions, or statements appear in this journal. The data and opinions appearing in the articles herein are the responsibility of the contributor concerned.

Editor: Elizabeth Gilman Assistant Editor: Charles Wingfelder Editorial Committee: Stephanie Cramer, Gregory Delaney, Randy Fernando Production Assistance: Kalyn Faller, Lukas Fetzko, Hope Forgus, Michael Gac, Jose Ruel V Bozzolo-Fabia, Michael Paraszczak Editorial Assistance: Holly Cook, Ashley Gilman, Joelle Haseley, Bradshaw Hovey, Rachel Teaman Printed by Chakra Communications, Inc. Typeset in Avenir Next and Lemon/Milk Š 2020 School of Architecture and Planning University at Buffalo, The State University of New York All rights reserved 22 | First Edition Cataloging-in-Publication Data Intersight Volume 22 ISBN: 978-0-9973650-6-1

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letter from the dean

04.24.2020 Robert G. Shibley, FAIA, FAICP, Professor and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning 8

The School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Buffalo is, in a sense, a paradox. Born half a century ago as a challenge to conventional design education, the school has sustained a practice of critique and challenge, of innovation and invention, and of pushing the boundaries of professional practice in a changing world. This attitude, this approach, has become our tradition. A tradition of critique. A tradition of change.

Intersight 22 is this year’s edition of a student journal published since 1990, and this year celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of what was originally known as the School of Architecture and Environmental Design. Intersight is edited by each year’s Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow. The fellowship was established in 1990 through a gift from former UB President, Stephen Sample, and his wife, Kathryn A. Brunkow, as a means to document and reflect upon the pedagogy and life of the School.

This year’s Brunkow Fellow, Elizabeth Gilman (MArch ’20, BS Arch ‘18), designed an ingenious process for production of the journal, placing current faculty and students in dialogic relationship with the ideas of some of the founding muses of the School and juxtaposing those conversations with the annual work product of students in architecture, planning, real estate development, historic preservation, and environmental design. The result is a rich and provocative inquiry into the pedagogical intention and achievement of the school, now and over our first half century.

In recent years, editors of Intersight have used interviews or conversations as a method to explore issues in teaching and learning in the design professions. Gilman has taken this approach further by provoking each of five dialogues by reference to an individual whose ideas were influential in the

founding and development of the School and, arguably, still have currency today: John P. Eberhard, founding Dean of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design (1968-1973); R. Buckminster Fuller, who frequently visited to the School in the 1970s; Robert M. Hutchins, 20th century educational philosopher and long-time president of the University of Chicago; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, leader of Bauhaus schools in New World and Old, and mentor to Harold L. Cohen, second dean of our School; and Louis H. Sullivan, whose Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings I used as a primary text for years in my course “Introduction to Architecture.”

Their insights remain relevant to the life of the school where learning is student-centered, hands-on, experiential, committed to critical inquiry and, above all, the improvement of the built and natural environments in which we live.

The student work documented along with these conversations covers an extensive territory of skill-building, material experimentation, creative speculation, research, design, planning and policy. All of it expresses a determination to tackle new problems, work across disciplines, be informed by precedent but not bound by it, and keep in view the “social whole.”

The work includes: Explorations of materials and structures: a studio on the “Tectonics of Buoyancy,” building in the dynamism of water; experimenting with “bio-climatic façade installations” like walls that cool the air or give homes to bees; testing the capacity of plywood forms to provide emergency shelter for displaced persons; experimenting

1983: This first-year architectural studio was taught by William S. Huff, who joined the faculty in 1974. His method of teaching through the fundamentals of basic design has greatly influenced the School's architectural program.

1987: This planning studio was taught by Ibrahim Jammal, one of the first faculty members, who joined the School in 1969. He founded the planning department, bringing a global perspective to the program.

with the structural properties of paper in “Pulp”; and design and production of laufmaschines, the precursor to the bicycle.

Barn at the Richardson Center; “Envisioning Kensington Heights,” a project for the redevelopment of a vacant urban site involving students in architecture, planning, real estate development, and urban design.

Situated design projects: the freshman design-build studio as a first exploration of material and structure, space and form; re-thinking urban multi-family house as bridge between “self and society”; a new building design for UB special collections; a “Resilience Hub” combining housing, structure, greening; concepts for urban infill housing in “Good Neighbors.”

Products from study abroad: Concepts for a UB cultural campus in Madrid; designs for a day care center in Monteverde, Costa Rica; experiments in the structural and formal potential of wood compression in rural Japan.

Speculative exercises: an urban design studio producing design proposals for “Strange Towns”; a Master’s thesis exploring the use of blockchain technology as a platform for distributed and open design collaboration; environmental inquiries like “Silence” in which students produced wearable devices to explore the psycho-dynamics of sound.

Somewhere here, between the depth of the conversations captured in the pages that follow and the density of the work produced by our students in the course of a single academic year, the ideas of the School’s founding influences, still resonate, developed through the work of the intervening fifty years, but relevant nevertheless.

Applied planning projects: A feasibility study for an innovation district in downtown Buffalo; for a student business incubator using inclusive design principles; a neighborhood development plan for Buffalo’s Kaisertown neighborhood; and a proposal for a new greenway in North Buffalo.

So, we remain a challenge to the professions. We sustain a critique, even as we prepare professionals for practice. But as Martha Bohm argues in this book’s opening dialogue, what remains is that we train the professionals we believe the world needs, not necessarily in the way that the world requests we provide them.

Research: into the provision of bicycle infrastructure as a promoter of active lifestyles; explorations of “Smart Mobility” in anticipation of coming changes in transportation technology; a Master’s thesis entitled “Transitory Skin” making theoretical and material inquiry into processes of layering in architecture.

Interdisciplinary efforts: A combined preservation, real estate, planning studio to consider the potential adaptive reuse for a

Robert G. Shibley

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intro

04.03.2020

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Elizabeth Gilman, MArch, Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow (2019 - 2020), Editor

iNTERSIGHT As the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning annual publication of student work, Intersight captures the present intellectual and cultural moments of our school. Since the redevelopment of the journal's agenda through Intersight 19, discussion has become a key component to the series as a mode of celebration, evaluation, and critique.

INTERSIGHT 22 This year’s edition of Intersight builds off of the trajectory of the past three volumes by bringing together faculty and students in a series of conversations that reflect on our school’s pedagogical development and provoke critique of ideologies, both past and present. Each centers around statements made by prominent architectural and educational figures from the past, which became pivotal in shaping the fundamental ideas behind our school’s creation and evolution. The intent behind these conversations was to reflect on student perceptions of their education; to locate current ideological focuses within the school; and to engage the collective intellect and experiences cultivated within our program.

By looking at the school's ideological foundations through the lens of time, Intersight 22 has become a tool to evaluate and situate the past year of student work in the context of the School of Architecture and Planning’s history. In terms of design and education, this past year cannot, and does not, stand alone, as each project, intentionally or not, is in some way a reaction to or reflection of the school's pedagogical development. The continuous accumulation of knowledge and experience over time, by both faculty and students, allows for the strengthening, fluctuation, and refinement of the school's driving principles.

Using our pedagogical context as a basis for critique and self reflection allows the School of Architecture and Planning to keep pushing boundaries and developing new educational trajectories. Intersight 22 has aimed to tap into and understand this temporality by looking at the school's history in relation to our current stance on design education and philosophy. Through the dialogue of the conversations, it became clear that the various ways of thinking that are present have become a distinct and valued part of our school's culture.

foundational underpinnings The journal opens with a response to the thoughts of John P. Eberhard, who made revolutionary strides in design education as he founded the School of Architecture and Environmental Design. The discussion was based on an interview from Engineering News-Record from May 8, 1969, entitled The Way Architects Practice Must Change. The article features Eberhard and his ideas on how to restructure architectural schools as a means to restructure architectural practice. He was much more interested in teaching students how to think than simply teaching them how to draw.

The next four conversations were prompted by statements from Buckminster Fuller, Robert M. Hutchins, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Louis Sullivan that were used as a prelude to a master plan for the School of Architecture and Environmental Design, submitted by Dean Harold Cohen (1974-1984) to the university in 1975. The excerpts were taken from Fuller's 1963 book, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure; Hutchins' 1943 book, Education for Freedom; Moholy-Nagy's 1946 book, Vision

in Motion; and various selections from Sullivan's writing, collected between 1895 and 1918.

Buckminster Fuller worked within and across many different fields of study, including architecture, engineering, education, and design. He was interested in using technology to solve global issues and to promote a holistic view of the planet.

Hutchins was an educational philosopher who believed strongly in secular perennialism - the idea that broader topics that are of “everlasting pertinence” should be taught in universities over specialization. He wanted students to learn how to think rather than what to think.

László Moholy-Nagy was an artist whose goal was to "illuminate the interrelatedness of life, art, and technology.” He taught at the Bauhaus School of Art from 1923 to 1928, and opened the School of Design in Chicago in 1939. Moholy-Nagy kept an account of his efforts in developing the curriculum for his school, which were posthumously published as Vision in Motion in 1946.

Louis Sullivan was an architect who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1872 and the Ecole des Beaux - Arts in 1874. Many of Sullivan’s thoughts on architectural education seem to be a direct response to the Beaux - Arts educational model, critiquing their antiquated traditions and historicism.

These snapshots of ideas from 1895, 1943, 1946, and 1963, captured as moments of inspiration in 1975 by Dean Cohen, allowed for the school to further develop their foundation of

thought. By simultaneously responding to these ideas and our current educational context, the conversations were able to flow between past and present to discuss current pedagogical themes within the school.

The culminating conversation was different from the previous five in that it didn’t have a preluding prompt derived from historical content. There was no quote or excerpt to steer the discussion.

Rather, it served as a moment of projection. The conversation focused on where the school is headed, future plans, and the expansion of both pedagogy and culture.

COLLAGES The collages that prelude the discussions aim to represent the relationship between current work and the foundational underpinnings. Each was made by the editor using pieces of student work, which were selected based off of themes from both the excerpts and the discussions.

responses The conversations were curated to allow faculty and students to engage in a meaningful way outside of a studio setting. Groups were arranged to include people from different academic years, programs, teaching tracks, and research backgrounds. The goal of the conversations was to tap into a range of different experiences, exposing different ways of thinking, broadening scopes of thought, and allowing for students and professors to listen to and learn from one another.

A range of different issues and topics, from the ethics of design, to multi-scalar thought and the freedom of failure, were illuminated through the dialogue of each dynamic grouping. The discussion titles are a retrospective attempt at embodying the themes that arose within each conversation. These conversations then serve as a backbone to the structure of Intersight 22, allowing student work to be organized in relation to the various themes and topics.

Looking forward

05.08.1969: This article, The Way Architect Practice Must Change, discusses Eberhard's systems approach to design and his critique of the design profession.

The ideas that inspired the development of our school and its culture have been continually added to and redacted from, manifesting over time to create our current ideological landscape.

Intersight 22 taps into this extended timescale of thought. How can these ideas influence design work? How can they influence the way one looks at and engages with the profession? How can they instigate further reactions to topics like the responsibility of designers, the integration of education and the profession, and the relevancy of time and context in design education?

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26 30 34 38 42 46 62 66 70 72 76

responding to robert m. hutchins

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theory & adaptation

impact & agency

pedagogy & place

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responding to buckminster fuller

responding to john p. eberhard

contents

80 92 96 102

122 124 128 132 136 152 156 160

what’s next?

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responding to louis sullivan

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responding to lÁszlÓ moholy-nagy

106 164

looking forward

crisis & critique

flexibility & integration

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excerpts from an interview in The Way Architects Practice Must Change, Engineering New Record, 1969

“‘Architects, as conventionally conceived, are obsolete,’ Eberhard says. ‘It is no longer sensible to talk about one body of men called architects as though they were the only ones involved in architecture.’ He says environmental designers must operate as a team led by men trained as generalists...

Eberhard is an architect, but he believes the designer of the future ‘will be a person able to participate in the management’ of large-scale systems composed of many disciplines.

Design team members might include engineers, psychologists, politicians, economists, ecologists, artists and technicians...A team approach to environmental design problems is an absolute necessity, Eberhard says.

He blames part of the urban crisis on architects, for erecting buildings to satisfy a single client, rather than the community as a whole. ‘We have to admit our ignorance and approach the problem systematically. We know more about the domestic needs of apes than we do about people...We have designed cities the same way since the Roman Empire and have almost lost sight of the problems for love of the product.’

For these reasons, Eberhard will train his students in the systems approach to design problems. They will study behavioral sciences, as well as engineering, building technology and computer science. He wants students to focus on the process of design and building, not on products, such as houses and structures...

In the university, some students wonder if the world will be ready for them when they are ready for it. [Eric] Larrabee admits it is ‘almost educationally irresponsible to train students for jobs that do not yet exist,’ but says, ‘we must start somewhere.’

Another associate says, ‘Some academic conservatives think architecture must be static and esthetic. They are puzzled by Eberhard’s concepts, if not hostile to them.’

Eberhard says: ‘I would rather be the dean of students pressing the faculty for an education, than the dean of a faculty looking for students to absorb its wisdom.’”

Collage of student work with John P. Eberhard

REsponse 01.21.2020

Elizabeth Gilman

Charles Wingfelder Martha Bohm Samina Raja 16

Robert Shibley

Elizabeth Gilman: I wanted to see what you guys thought about this kind of spirit of fighting conventions that seemed to drive Eberhard, at least in the beginning.

And I guess, is that still a priority with the school? How does it continue to influence the pedagogy?

Robert Shibley: My sense about it is it’s less about fighting conventions and more about critically questioning everything, always. Fighting conventions implies that the conventions drive us, and what I would say, and what I think John would say, is it’s about trying to think through the entire enterprise all the time. A piece of that is a kind of scrappy nature that just goes right into the teeth of whatever’s in front of you, and you try to work your way through it.

So, there’s a piece that’s emerging in the 50-year history of the school which takes a thesis that says each dean, whether they intend it or not, and the leadership team that accompanies that dean, tend to follow a fairly consistent intellectual arc of that same kind of inquiry, that pushes the boundaries. And this school, more than most, can show a very consistent aspiration to push those boundaries.

Sometimes the motivation for that push comes from a dean like John Eberhard,

sometimes it comes from a faculty that’s been put in place that succeeds a dean but carries the hiring philosophy of the leadership team at the time, even after the leadership team goes, that faculty category is still there. So there’s a kind of an arc of the school which carries the spirit of this piece. At the end of the article, there’s a couple of folks who are challenging whether what he was specifically envisioning was possible.

It was a confrontation of the existing norms of architectural education in the sense they actually seem to suggest that architectural registration wasn’t the goal, it was about something more fundamental.

It was about thinking about place and circumstance in systemic ways and using evidence to found your movement forward, and I would say that’s been very consistent in the 50-year history of the school.

At the same time, we ultimately owned up to the reality that in order to be successful in terms of the numbers where you’re starting with, you have to deliver an accredited program. That’s both in the economy of the university and why we would emphasize our Master’s as a first professional, but it’s also in the reality that students won’t come if they can’t see the

employment after fairly clearly marked out.

I don’t think that compromises us. I just think it expands the scope of our mission.

What do you think?

Martha Bohm: If fighting conventions is still the objective of the school?

EG: Yeah, or I think better put, pushing boundaries.

MB: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a really interesting question. I would say that the boundaries that are being fought have moved. But I think it’s learning to understand where those boundaries reside and how to effectively make change, whether that means moving a boundary, threatening it, questioning it, or working within it. Some of them work well, some boundaries and regulatory structures or certifications or embedded systemic parameters are good, some are not. And so I think it’s become a more sophisticated process, a more nuanced process. Kind of more of a, in today’s language, “move fast and break things” approach, which I don’t think is quite as much of the ethos in the school. I think “move fast and build things,” not “move fast and break things.” I guess that would be one way to translate it.

I would say the thing that has remained is that the school is endeavoring to train professionals for the way that the world needs them, not necessarily the way that the world is requesting we provide them.

So looking ahead, what does the world need from design professionals, from practitioners? Not just what does it have now?

RS: If you go to that position and you realize the work that Martha and others put out on alternatives to patronage, that notion of what the world demands versus what they are consciously and intentionally asking for are two different things, and looking for what we demand is perhaps fighting conventions right down to the core of capitalism. [chuckle] MB: That’s exactly it. It has to go there pretty quickly, right? Because money and power.

RS: Every morning. [laughter] MB: Every morning after breakfast.

Hopefully, coffee first, then fighting money and power. But the structures of money and power will demand certain things of the design professions. And unfortunately, we have a long history of relationships, especially within architecture but also when planning the urban environment and associating ourselves with those structures, and if those are creating the problems that we’re also attempting to solve, we have created a real challenge for our profession where the people who give us money and the people who demand our services are not the same, and that’s what we, I think, have to fundamentally address and train our students, train practitioners to be able to negotiate.

RS: Arguably economists record that 50% or 60% of the global GDP is invested in real estate development, so if that’s true in all its various guises, and I don’t have the skillset to assess that, but I’ve read it often, in particular real estate periodicals and some economic periodicals, then if you’re going to make the world, you’re going to have to address the implicit wealth creation that architects and planners serve.

And the critique of that wealth creation is essentially the responsibility of any critical thinker, so we aspire to be critical thinkers and we’re right in the teeth of that. It’s huge, it’s the very structure of our profession, and going back to your earlier question, has that always been at the center stage? I think more or less, yeah.

Samina Raja: I guess I’ll speak more to planning as that may be a little bit different and maybe supplementary to what Bob and Martha have already shared. I’ll start with a little anecdote that just happened in the last two weeks. I don’t know Elizabeth if you know this, but I’m right now in India, where we have had seven UB students working with 36 students from Kerala, which is a southern state in India, on developing the food systems plan for a little village in southern India. This plan is probably the first of its kind in the global south, and our students are doing the plan but also trying to make a technique to do it.

When I arrived in the village with the local students, I was chatting with one of the faculty about the importance of pushing conventions and how our School of Architecture and Planning has created the space for faculty to explore interdisciplinary and somewhat unusual paths. And one of the paths that I described to her was our interest in linking architecture and planning with health and with food systems and with many other disciplines. And as I was explaining to her all of this, I said to her some of the

topics we pick up are new, but we have a history of challenging conventions, and I mentioned John Eberhard’s name briefly because I don’t actually know a lot about his work. And the funny thing was she responded, and she said, “John Eberhard from the American Neuroscience...” And then she named the organization that he founded.

Long story short, John Eberhard’s organization that he founded provided a grant to this faculty member that we are partnering with in the southern part of India, totally different side of the globe. So

“i would say the thing that has remained is that the school is endeavoring to train professionals for the way that the world needs them, not necessarily the way that the world is requesting we provide them.”

- Martha bohm

John’s history of doing innovative work is being felt in this very far away place from us, so we are experiencing that connection even today.

And then, our current students are engaged in this novel experimentation of linking planning with food systems, which is completely new, and then circling back with people who are both inspired by John’s work and now engaging in what I would say is very unique work. So to answer your question, I would say we have a history of doing that, and we continue to do that, maybe in different ways, but

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there’s still plenty of examples of us doing that.

their own institutionalized ways of solving things, right?

EG: That’s amazing.

I think the design method and the scientific method are very different approaches to knowledge creation, and they don’t necessarily automatically make sense to each other, and so there’s a continual evolution bringing other people into that fold. That’s my sense, is that it plays out best in the graduate-level studio approaches. And look at what’s happening in the RED program, where you have architects, planners, and real estate developers coming together in a studio to do this kind of thing. I think we continue to build out ways for that to happen.

RS: It is a small world. It does occur to me that we haven’t fully addressed the pedagogy side of that question: are we structuring our learning experiences in such a manner that reinforces that intellectual arc?

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MB: I think that when you look at the way that Eberhard describes interdisciplinary problem-based teaching, that to me with problem definition, criteria establishment, proposal formation, and testing... as a process, that to me sounds like graduate research group studio work, as I’ve experienced it and as I’ve taught it. So I think, in a way, we’ve become accustomed to a pretty revolutionary approach to teaching, and I find that we are steeped in that here. I think that’s still the way that we teach and it’s strongest at the graduate level, we build to that approach to teaching where people have that freedom and yet the high demand of problem framing as well as problem-solving.

And you get most struck by that when you are setting up collaborations across the university or other disciplines who don’t approach problems that way. So I think what’s really exciting for me is that working with other disciplines at UB or wherever and then bringing them into that process.

It’s very exciting and empowering for people trained in the sciences to take an approach that’s team-based, that’s making oriented, that’s about problem definition and not just problem-solving. So I think we still do that for sure, and in a way, it doesn’t even feel novel to us anymore, but I think the novelty comes in pulling in those larger chains into that process, which is hard because other traditions of learning and approaching problems have

RS: Every year, I sit down with about 15 deans in the northeast, and for years and years one dean, in particular, would describe a rather classic approach to architectural education and then listen with horror as the deans, some of them new in other schools, spoke to how they were expanding, offering new Master’s of Sciences, joint degrees across their institutions, experimenting with different kinds of pedagogies. And this dean, who will remain unnamed for the purposes of this discussion, would often conclude the meeting by saying that he was the only dean that still had an architecture school, which usually made us all pretty angry and generated a fair amount of additional conversation which was interesting.

But I think that there’s a general tendency for architects to be both ornamental in collegiate schools of architecture.

That is to say, “Isn’t that nice? We’ve got one.” And at the same time they exempt themselves, they step out of the academy as, “We’re special, we’re unique.” And what Martha just described is that, indeed, we are but not because we exempt ourselves from the mission and the institution that hosts us, but because we go right into it

recognizing its value, in a range of new frontiers of learning and student capacity to perform. So when you think about John, starting with systems thinking and, towards the end of his career, founding an institute of brain surgeons and neurologists who might find a home in a practice that’s related to making places that do good things for the neurology of human beings. It’s a pretty interesting continuation of where he started, it’s just expanding the system.

So at our peril, we invite students to, and you used the word, problem framing, as a kind of intellectual way into things. That is to say, if you’re only solving problems already known, you do not understand when the problem statement itself is not stated properly.

And so, bringing critique to the problem statement changes the definition of our pursuit and, from my point of view, keeps it fresh. We will never be accused of doing just the same old thing. It’s graduate research groups, each one on the edge of their profession moving forward, or in planning it’s a specialization, on the edge of their performance, take food systems, for example. “First ever” often is used in the context of that work that’s taking us forward.

Charles Wingfelder: How do you balance, though, that idea of boundarypushing and exploratory education, thinking with – I can’t remember exactly what the quote was in here, but – from the student saying, “It’s irresponsible to train students for jobs that don’t exist yet”? I mean, I agree with you personally, but I think that that’s a popular question.

RS: That’s a great question. [laughter] That it’s irresponsible to train students for jobs that don’t exist yet, countered with, “It’s irresponsible not to train students for jobs that don’t exist yet.” In fact, it’s

irresponsible not to reframe those jobs.

How is it irresponsible? It’s irresponsible in the context, in the critique of capitalism as just a modest beginning. It’s irresponsible that brain surgeons didn’t have a seat at the table when John started this school, and now they do. They are trying to influence how architects think about making place related to how places affect the neurology of the brain.

The other part of this is that materials, construction, social inventions about how we build and why we build, typology in building continue to evolve. We’ll understand that evolution if we research and skate to where, metaphorically, the puck is going, as opposed to being dragged along behind where it is. You’re never going to win that goal going where the puck just was. So again, it’s irresponsible to skate that way if the goal is to understand and anticipate where the world and the professions that support it are going. So I think that one’s unequivocal. Every now and then, I’m in an environment where someone wants to insult me by calling me an academic.

and critical thinking, and again, looking at the framing of a problem, how it’s delivered, whether it’s important, whether it’s the right, allows you to deploy the skills in a changing environment.

And we have to stay mindful of the fact that there are some structures, for example, I would argue, the accreditation world is really I think geared more towards skill building than it is towards developing critical thinking. The university is pretty well set up to encourage critical thinking, that’s what the academy is developed for.

So we’re in a professional school within an academic world, so we’re doing both of those things, and I’m just overly simplifying it, I don’t think we just do two things, but for the point of the conversation, I think that.

So I think if we get too far ahead of ourselves and really worrying about this software package or this representation

technique without thinking, “Why are we designing hotels for people in a place that we shouldn’t even be building?” You know, like, then we’re out of sync there. So I think if we stay mindful of, “What are we training people to do, and why are they doing it?” We will be preparing them for both, to be able to say, “Yes, I’m taking this job, but this job shouldn’t exist, and in 10 years it’s going to be phased out, and I’m prepared for that as well.” And I think we can continue to thread that needle and we have to. And I think, at least in terms of my own teaching, I have tried to set that – you guys that have taken my class and you can tell me... [laughter] But to set that inconsistency out there. I will tell you how we use energy in buildings, and I will also tell you that we shouldn’t be doing that and we need to do it a different way, but, this is what we’re doing,

[laughter] It’s like it’s never going to work. [chuckle] I’m never going to be insulted.

MB: Yeah, the one way that I think about it is there are multiple things that we’re doing within the school, some are training in a certain number of skills, and then some is fostering critical thinking. And I think that likely the skills of drawing, rendering, model making, presenting will be used in the architect profession, whatever it looks like in 50 years. Maybe use a different software program, maybe we’ll make models out of different things, but likely we will be in that field of work.

And so if we just did this people would be prepared for jobs as they are, maybe not as they will be. But with the kind of training

03.13.2020: Mustafa Ardalan, part of a Real Estate Development, Architecture, and Urban Planning graduate studio led by Mark Forester and Hiroaki Hata, describing their proposal for the redevelopment of the Eastern Hills Mall in Clarence. (photo by Yifan He)

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and this is what you’re going to do the first five years in your career, but hopefully by year 50 you will be doing something else, and this will have phased out, and you should be prepared for that. So it’s tough because you have to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, but I think our students are able to do that.

I’m not sure. So we did that work in the United States, but this particular group of students that I mentioned is in India right now, they are also breaking ground in the global south meaning that kind of work has not really happened in low and middle-income countries, it’s the first time it’s happening.

EG: Samina, the work that you’re doing, especially right now, you’re kind of breaking ground. How do you see this influencing the students that you’re working with? Obviously, they’re going to carry this with them forever, but do they understand that they are also helping you break ground?

I would say some students are more acutely aware that they are breaking ground, but for some of them, honestly, it’s just how the school is, they’re always trying new things. And so I think that testing out new ideas to some degree is kind of the default for our students, so I’m

SR: I would say absolutely, yes. And to give a little context because you have no reason to know this, about 15 years ago or maybe 18 years ago, the phrase food systems, or food as a part of planning was not a thing in the United States, it just wasn’t. And it has grown over the last 15, 20 years and our school has been central to that growth, and I would say in that growth students have played a dominant role. And I’ll give an example from our history and then fast forward to today.

So the first studio report from a planning program that focused on food systems came out of our school in 2003 and won the national award from the American Institute of Certified Planners for the best student plan in the country.

So that plan was developed for a neighborhood in the city of Buffalo, on the west side for an organization called the Massachusetts Avenue Project.

Until our students did that, that kind of work just had not received national recognition. Many of those students are employed in positions where they do food-related work, so I would say they absolutely recognize now that they were at the leading edge. At the time, did they know that UB was at the leading edge?

“This is your space to experiment and actually fail. Because that’s, I think, more important than having a successful project at the end. Failure has incredible learning opportunities.”

- samina raja

I explain to them about the new ground we are treading together and the kind of anxiety that can generate? So, to be honest, I probably go back and forth every semester that I teach a new project, sometimes I remind them that we’re working with an international organization.

So, for example, the project at Kerala, the Food and Agriculture Organization, is watching what our students do because they’re piloting a technique that hasn’t been used. But at the same time, I think my first job as the teacher is to always tell students, “This is your space to experiment and actually fail.” Because that’s, I think, more important than having a successful project at the end. Failure has incredible learning opportunities.

So I think in order to answer your question, I think there are pros and cons for both.

So when they are aware, I think they feel pride, and they are inspired, but if they kind of are weighted by it because they think there’s this anxiety tied to it, I don’t think that that’s productive or it’s not productive to their learning. I think they have to feel like they can fail, and it’s okay.

Does that make sense?

CW: Absolutely.

RS: So let’s argue about that.

not sure that they realize when they are within the program that they are doing things that perhaps are new.

SR: Okay, I like that.

CW: Samina, can I follow that up with another question? Do you think it is beneficial for students to have that awareness? As in, does that give the experience more significance, or do you think that there’s actually in some ways a benefit to not feeling as much pressure towards the whole situation?

RS: I don’t...I don’t disagree. In the spirit of what you’re offering as the freedom to fail is critical to pedagogy, and I think we all understand that we have to fail early and often in studio work to ever get to and get past the dumb plan to the elegant plan and design and execution. I think the same is true in planning. That said, there is a presumption of freedom to fail that is not responsible for the context you’re working in.

SR: It does, and it’s a great question because I ponder it myself. How much do

[laughter]

So, for example, you, in India, in this village, will not fail to advance the cause of food systems planning for that village.

And we take on community clients literally every day, going back to the pedagogical imperatives we work with and have a responsibility not to use their time badly or to extract from them. And I know you agree with this, Samina, you have to be able to responsibly work so that failure is a shared agenda on the path to not failing. This is slightly different than, “I have to protect my students with the freedom to fail” as if they were irresponsible to the context they’re in and an aspiration to advance that context with them as distinct from for them. So, I always wrestle with the freedom to fail as an excuse for pedagogy that sounds like, “I don’t have to worry if it’s going to be implemented.” When in fact, what we’re doing in each failure is getting closer and closer to a better approach to implementation. Does that work for you?

SR: It does, with some modification. [laughter] RS: Surprise.

SR: This is why this is fun. So when I talk about students’ freedom to fail, it doesn’t mean the overall initiative fails. And I think that’s one of the reasons why teaching studio, for example, is so much fun for faculty who like doing that. I am ultimately responsible for the success of the overall initiative so, faculty... I know you both do this, too, and I think we all are in are the same camp. We had to create kind of a threshold within which students have the freedom to experiment and fail, but I do agree that I have to provide that safety net where we’re still delivering for our community and being responsible to our partners.

Another thing that I think makes our pedagogy interesting, is that we always, I

certainly do, involve or have other layers in the studio projects that cushion against that kind of irresponsibility, if you will. So I don’t disagree with you, Bob, but I think we have to clarify the difference between students’ freedom to fail and overall, the collective enterprises’ ability to be responsible. I think that’s the sweet spot.

RS: Keeping both things in your mind at the same time is critical.

SR: Yep, yep, exactly.

RS: There’s another anecdote that might be useful. Toshiko Mori is currently implementing a pretty radical modification to the Botanical Gardens in South Buffalo.

Four years before she was retained, we did a studio with the Client Constituency of the Botanical Gardens, the not-for-profit that runs that operation. Actually, we did more than one studio. We did several, and we published a kind of book of options or ways of thinking about how you take this historically significant building in a historic park and really do something innovative, but at the same time, respectful. And I would say many of the things we did failed at being fully respectful, and it kind of aimed at a much more aspirant, highly innovative kind of approach to thinking about how to place that historical artifact in the context of the future needs of the Botanical Gardens and the historical context and the existing building.

The net effect was that the community changed its aspirations, began to imagine they weren’t trapped in only an architectural expression that stood apart from, and modestly stood down from the historical piece but rather, “Couldn’t you imagine doing something quite remarkable here?” And the fact that it wasn’t yet still opened the question opened the opportunity for that. So I would describe those as wonderful failures.

They were great because they opened

up the conversation to go another level and, in many ways, empowered Toshiko to take her architecture to the next level of aspiration. Where before that studio, that family of studios, I think the aspiration level was low and modest, intimidated by the historical context. The aspiration level became grand and spectacular while at the same time respecting that context.

And that’s what Toshiko Mori is a master at, and I think we helped create the invitation for that work. Often that’s the nature of our failures. They open conversations to new possibilities.

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MODERATORS ELIZABETH GILMAN: MArch Student, Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow (2019 - 2020), Editor CHARLES WINGFELDER: MArch Student, Assistant Editor PARTICIPANTS MARTHA BOHM: Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor - Department of Architecture

SAMINA RAJA: Associate Dean for Research and Inclusive Excellence, Professor - Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Director of the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab ROBERT SHIBLEY: Professor and Dean - School of Architecture and Planning

tectonics of buoyancy

Students:

Faculty:

junior studio fall 2019; ARC 301 22

Team:

Program:

Samantha Kalinski, Damian Majkrzak, Paul Odell, Zakaria Siddiqui, Taylor Stewart (Cocoon), Samantha Kalinski, Damian Majkrzak (Agglo), Isabelle Dabrowski, Marietta Koeberle, Brianna Mancini, Benjamin Wemesfelder (B.V. Gallagher) Leo McDowell Chmelar, Benjamin Wemesfelder (EnviroMovement) Randy Fernando, Emily Kutil

Elaine Chow, Randy Fernando, Emiliy Kutil, Christopher Romano (coordinator), John Speilman

BS Arch

The relationship between the water and the city, between water and people, and between water and architecture, is a critically important issue. In the BuffaloNiagara Region, it is now understood that the typical strategy of fortifying against the elements and creating barricades along the water has had catastrophic ecological, social, and cultural impacts. The junior’s semester-long investigation explored and reflected on the role of water in human settlement and new tectonic possibilities for living in and along the water’s edge.

into the vessel, and return to shore. The first studio to complete all three tasks won the Keelson Award.

The studio began with the design and construction of buoyant vessels. These became points of investigation for fundamental questions pertaining to architectural tectonics, such as space and geometry, structure and skin, form and function, and material and construction.

COCOON

Each studio had to produce three boats, each designed to complete a different task at the culminating regatta at Gallagher Beach. The first heat tested speed and had the skippers race the length of the beach. The paddle was then passed off to the next skipper, who had to maneuver between piers. The third heat required the skipper to paddle out to a buoy, retrieve a 60-pound drybag, lift it

To further the pedagogical investigation into tectonics, and to understand the relationship between water and the built environment, students were tasked with designing a River-Station to reintegrate people and water. The experimental proposals were required to “float” within Buffalo’s outer harbor.

This vessel utilizes kinetic fabric to be hyper-responsive to the human body.

As weight and force are applied, the fabric skin goes through two main phase changes. When the fabric is relaxed and neutral, it is in its passive stage. When external forces are applied, causing the fabric to stretch and elongate, it is in its active stage.

The kinetic skin allows the user to find equilibrium by stabilizing the body while the surface area displaces water beneath to steady the vessel. The fabric is coated in fiber glass resin to create a waterproof membrane. The combination of these

Agglo: diagrammatic perspective

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Enviro-Movement: section showing kinetic rail system

ective Section

A

B

Cocoon: Damian Majkrzak observing how structure and skin react to an applied force

C

Cocoon: junior faculty reviewing study models

D

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09.27.2019: Ben Wemesfelder taking B.V. Gallagher for a test run along the shore of Gallagher Beach to check for stability, buoyancy, and maneuverability before the studio-wide regatta. After observing issues with the vessel's capacity to be steered, the team decided to add a keel to improve their control over the boat's movement.

elements allow the user to create an intimate relationship with the vessel.

AGGLO Majkrzak and Kalinski carried over the structural logic of Cocoon into the design of Agglo. The masts, cables, buoys, anchor points, and skin act as one tensile system.

This flexibility allows for the structure and form to be physically responsive to natural forces. The skin will flex and transform spatially in response to seasonal changes and forces applied by water currents.

Majkrzak and Kalinski’s conceptual development and programmatic organization were informed by a biological understanding of seaweed clusters. This translated into the design of a series of tubes based on the logic of the clusters. The largest tubes were structural, allowing the masts to pass through the space. They also allowed light to enter into the space and filter down to the water, becoming a site of photosynthetic activity for the seaweed and a space for observing growth and marine life.

B.V. GALLAGHER

ENVIRO-MOVEMENT

This vessel was designed to compete in the third heat, so the structure also had to be capable of picking up sand bags from the water and placing them inside. This meant that the boat had to be properly sealed and able to lean on one side without taking in any water.

Wesemfelder and McDowell-Chmelar’s Enviro-Movement consisted of five separate bulbs. They were designed to respond to the forces of nature and the movement of the lake. With everchanging conditions on Lake Erie, such as the rise and fall of water levels, wave action, and weather, the system of bulbs utilize an expressive and flexible structural concept.

The team’s process started with a flat bottom boat that had arms that curved out. The main idea behind this was that a flat bottom would disperse the most amount of water and the space underneath the arms would act like a suction cup once the structure edge met the water level. During the testing process, the flat bottom made it difficult to move forward when rowing, so a keel was added to help steer.

The structure was built first, and then canvas and coats of exterior latex paint were layered on top for waterproofing. It won the Seaworthiness Award along with the Keelson Award for the overall studio.

The bulbs can individually fluctuate vertically up to 14 feet, depending on the applied forces, minimizing the overall movement felt by occupants. This is achieved through the design of kinetic rails that connect the main structures to their foundations, allowing for flexibility in the Z axis. Barge-like chambers sit on top of the rails and act as bases to the interior space within the bulbs, creating buoyancy.

The foundation, structure, and skin ultimately work together as one system to both dampen and display environmental motion.

sustainable futures

Students:

Faculty: costa rica study abroad program summer 2019 26

Sustainable Futures is a summer semester abroad that offers students the opportunity to live and work in the rural but rapidly developing region of Monteverde, Costa Rica. This interdisciplinary service learning program brings undergraduate and graduate students from Architecture, Environmental Design, and Landscape Architecture into interdisciplinary teams to work on community-identified public projects.

Located in the Los Llanos neighborhood, the Monteverde Cen Cinai daycare currently cares for about 125 children between the ages of 0-13 years. This organization provides critical support to working and single-parent households of the region, and has outgrown its space and needs to expand. The group’s goal was to analyze the current spaces and provide effective and efficient solutions to increase space and improve physical accessibility on the sloped site. They also strived to design spaces which blurred the distinction between indoor and outdoor, making landscape and nature an integral part of the learning experience.

With limited space on the site, the team chose to retain the existing building footprint and to add an upper level to

Program:

Olivia Duley (UMD), Rumaldo Genao, Xing Lin, Althea Seno (Experiential Learning), Remaldo Genao, Erik Louwagie, Saakena Nazir, Madeleine Ong (play structure), Adiadne Billy, Rachael Greenhawk (Maryland), Xing Hua, Martin Vargas (wood structure) Martha Bohm, Stephanie Cramer, Alyssa Catlin, Tracee Johnson (UMD), Gabriela McAdam (Monteverde Institute), Anibal Torres (Monteverde Institute, coordinator) BS Arch, MArch, BAED

the existing building. The second floor features a new balcony space that can be occupied by both staff and students, and provides a view to the activities happening on the lower level as well as views to the mountains. The balcony is protected from the elements by a green screen and, in nice weather, serves as a spill-over, outdoor learning space adjacent to the indoor classroom. A polycarbonate roof provides additional shelter while allowing sunlight to enter that area. Covered circulation space is flexible, and can also be used as a play space.

The building is naturally ventilated by windows located east and west, making use of the prevailing winds from the northeast. However, to protect the building during a high wind pressure event, the roof is sloped to guide the prevailing winds off the building. The roofs are overlapped at different heights between the two buildings, allowing sunlight and fresh air into the interstitial space while protecting it from rain and shedding water to a tank on the west side of the building. The roofs also are fitted with an array of solar panels to provide onsite energy production.

Experiential Learning: rendered perspective

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The proposed accessible path leads through a learning garden and ends at a new entrance. The learning garden is an area where children and adults can sit and relax, surrounded by nature. This secluded area incorporates textures and colors that engage the students, and will have signage to label the different varieties of plants. All plants in the learning garden are native to Costa Rica, and most are native to Monteverde.

The studio explored a mixture of found and natural materials for the new second floor that incorporates nature on the interior and exterior of the building. They propose recycled wood for structural elements, wood panels for the exterior, and locally, readily available materials such as corrugated metal or plastic roofing, and metal railings.

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Experiential Learning: section showing rainwater collection

Experiential Learning: section showing ventilation and wind collection

They focused on phasing the project so that the facility can continue to operate while construction takes place. In the short term the team of 16 students spent 10 days on-site building a series of four play structures; a covered bus stop and play structure; a gathering space; climbing, jumping, and swinging elements in the trees; a climbing wall; and an outdoor classroom. The daycare is currently exploring funding opportunities to undertake building extensions as proposed by the students.

students constructed a gathering space using found, natural materials

students walking through the cloud forest

a covered seating/play structure

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blockchain

architecture graduate thesis fall 2019 30

Blockchain technology is being adopted into many different fields and applications, and proponents of the technology ensure that it will revolutionize how we interact with others online. The technology has many implications for how relationships between individuals, institutions, and technologies are changing. For many, blockchain represents ideologies of the new digital revolution, in which collaboration and interactivity are at the forefront.

Blockchain technology has the potential to empower the individual and return the control of our online data into our hands, as it redefines what it means to transact with technology and institutions over the World Wide Web. If, in fact, blockchain technology will become ubiquitous, it is critical to understand how this technology will change the way individuals practice design. The purpose of this research is to speculate on the possible implications of blockchain technology on the professional practice of architecture, specifically investigating its role as a potential facilitator of an open-design process.

The research explores themes of authorship, agency, trust, security, and liability as they pertain to the architectural

Students: Faculty:

Evan Martinez

Omar Khan, Mark Shepard

Program: MArch

profession. In current practice, liability is spread among the multitude of stakeholders who provide input into a building. Trust and security are established through traditional contract terms and agreements, which serve as the basis for their relationships. However, there is often a lack of trust and security that is evident in these contractual agreements, often mitigated by the threat of costly litigation.

Navigating these relationships has become a large part of the responsibility of architects. There are also questions as to the agency of individual stakeholders and how much influence they have over a design.

Clients often have limited access to the initial design phases of a building and are thus excluded from the process. On the other hand, while architects remain responsible for a majority of the design, the authorship of a design is lost as various consultants, specialists, and engineers provide input into more and more complex building systems. The result is a complicated web of relationships between various stakeholders in the execution of a project, and an amalgamation and compilation of liability, trust, security, and agency which dilutes and disperses the authorship of any single building among

portion of the aBlock timeline

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portion of the aBlock timeline

this interconnected network of designers and builders.

comparison to the role of the designer in a parametric model.

Digital technologies further exaggerate this dispersal of authorship, as designers now operate on a global scale. Authors such as Mario Carpo and Kyle Steinfeld address the issues that arise in the new predominantly digital method of working in the architecture profession. While they both recognize a loss of authorship for the architect, they also imply that there is a corresponding increase in authorship and agency by other “actors,� such as the computer or other participants in the design process. This is most notable when discussing Building Information Modeling (BIM) and its ability to coordinate different participants in order to achieve both efficient flows of information and a consensus across all of its users, or when discussing the role of the algorithm in

Discussion of user-participation and a democratic design process is also relevant to the question of authorship, along with the already complicated network of stakeholders in a traditional design process. Blockchain technology, being a distributed method of connecting peer-to-peer, may have the potential to increase the agency of the client in the design process. aBlock: a Distributed Design Platform synthesizes emerging information on blockchain technology and its goals for creating an open, transparent, and democratic society with earlier agendas in architectural design theory to open up the design process to individuals and eliminate the hierarchical patronization of

expertise in the profession. The research builds upon these ideas as a basis for speculating on the changes blockchain technology will have on the architecture profession – specifically looking at its potential for changing the relationship between the architect and the client.

By designing and specifying a prototype for a decentralized application that would be operated on a distributed ledger (blockchain), the goal of this thesis is to test out ideas through scenariobased fictions in pursuit of revealing the changing role of the design professional in the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.

33

innovation district

graduate planning practicum spring 2019; URP 581 34

Students: Faculty:

Program:

Nkosi Alleyne, Rachel Bailey, Jocelyne Bello, Courtney Domst, Sarah Donohue, Megan Koury, Eli Levine, Maria Melchiorre, Nicholas Miller, Evan Roorand, Julia White, Vita Wu Ernerst Sternberg MUP, MSRED

The Urban Planning studio on the Feasibility of Innovation Districts in Buffalo has earned the inaugural “Best Student Paper” award in a national competition organized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. The inaugural Planning & Entrepreneurship Awards, sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, recognize faculty and student research at the intersection of urban planning and economic innovation.

In pursuit of creative and contemporary economic development strategies, a group of leaders in Western New York identified an innovation district (ID) as a valuable potential resource for this region. This term describes urban neighborhood-scale geographic places where a new economy combines hightech businesses and institutions within a collaborative built environment that is conducive to living, working, and playing.

This report investigates the plausibility of the emergence of an ID in the City of Buffalo or adjacent municipalities. The studio first sought to investigate appropriate locations for an ID. With insight from local leaders, they selected ten potential sites to study as possible places where a successful ID may arise. Additionally, initial locations were chosen based on their proximity to innovative activity and connections to regional assets and highpowered anchor institutions such as the University at Buffalo.

WHY ARE THESE INNOVATION DISTRICTS NEEDED? Innovation districts are one of several ways to improve the local economy, but not a full story of why or how economies improve.

The IDs do not attract just any companies. Companies in hightech are especially desirable to change the economy, bring in

future industries, and potentially diversify the economy of Buffalo.

The impact of physical space on the economy is still important; people are still unable to completely isolate from one another.

Through the alteration of the physical space, IDs can create vital neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have a high level of activity, often 24/7 lifestyles with different businesses and liveliness. Physical space place-making will create a place to help lead to collaborative work, and intradisciplinary idea sharing, increasing the likelihood that companies will succeed. Since IDs are urban in nature, they can help counter suburbanization while creating attractive areas that draw young people into the city. Since these districts are often strengthening the nearby educational and medical institutions, the predominant benefit of IDs is to the science and college-educated young adults.

However, there are also potential secondary jobs arising for the local community, benefiting those without this formal education.

The construction of IDs does not solve issues of undereducated people. There may be a way to plan for an ID without disposition and gentrification, with the inclusion of sufficient investment in affordable housing. There is also a potential for a reversal of the “brain drain” that many smaller cities with educational systems face. The introduction of an innovation district to a city is not a solution for poverty, however. Cities and neighborhoods with weak economies need help lifting their economy to flourish from other means.

WHAT THIS REPORT DOES There are a lot of different IDs in North America. This report shows the keys to building a prosperous innovation district while

35

the studio won the “Best Student Paper” award in a national competition given by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning

acknowledging that some can be clearly made with no real effort for marketing purposes. Identifying the potential for Buffalo to have a concrete innovation district that fits the studio’s definition will be the main focus of this report.

This report provides insight on IDs that already exist, or at least have been termed IDs, to give Western New York a better understanding of what key conditions should be considered when attempting to plan for this new type of development.

INNOVATION DISTRICTS DEFINED IDs are an approach to strengthen local urban economies. They provide for an urban neighborhood approach. The Brookings

Institute began arousing public interest in these developments with a series of publications beginning in 2013. They consider an innovation district as a “mash-up of entrepreneurs and educational institutions, start-ups and schools, mixed-use development and medical innovations, bike-sharing and bankable investments – all connected by transit, powered by clean energy, wired for digital technology, and fueled by caffeine.”

The studio provided a more rigorous definition of an innovation district: a concentration of innovative tech businesses and/ or institutions in a dense mixed-use urban area. A selection of other characteristics of these neighborhoods helps bring about the ID. These include housing, retail, the “funky” local businesses and cultural institutions, good walkability and transit connectivity, internet connectivity with the latest speeds. In addition, at the

To effectively use the identified locations of innovative firms, more defined measurements of an ID were needed. Therefore, the studio refined their definitions of a wider ID and a core ID. The wider ID is a larger designated area that supports or reinforces the core area while also benefiting from the core area’s success.

The wider ID is one to two square miles. The core ID is located within the wider ID and encompasses approximately 50- to 100-acres.

A total of 140 companies made it onto the inventory list. The list includes start-ups, more established firms, and large publicly traded corporations, all of which are heavily involved in research and development (R&D) activities. The total employment in this inventory is estimated to be approximately 9,517 individuals. This employment number is an approximation since only employment size ranges can be obtained for some companies. The firms were classified into 82 NAICS codes. In addition, to provide a more comprehensible listing, the companies were further categorized into 37 sectors based on their nature of business.

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05.15.2019: This map shows the four areas in Buffalo that have the potential to become effective innovation districts; Lafayette Square is highlighted in white.

very beginning of development, development space is needed, and the cost of space per square foot must be low enough to promote development.

FINDING INNOVATIVE ACTIVITY IN THE BUFFALO METRO AREA To locate an area in Western New York that would be appropriate for an ID, the studio identified and observed where innovative energy is already occurring by locating, databasing and mapping the innovative firms within the region.

The analysis of the locations of innovative activities in Western New York revealed that the broader area on which to focus the innovation district is the general downtown vicinity. This downtown area is roughly two square miles. Out of the ten sites initially recommended by local leaders, four are located in this downtown area, which extends from the waterfront to middle Main Street. These four potential IDs are the Waterfront, Lower Main, Lafayette Square vicinity, and Middle Main. In order to determine which 50- to 100-acre area makes the most sense for a core ID, the studio looked at the urban features within the four areas that could make an ID successful. The selection of a smaller area within the broader area was made through a concentrated neighborhood analysis.

CHOOSING A PROMISING LOCATION It became clear that a methodical way to both assess each location’s viability and to compare them to each other was needed. The studio created a rubric, a scorecard that can compare neighborhoods for their suitability as an ID. Although Buffalo’s downtown has undergone dis-investment and population loss, the decision to focus on four core districts within Buffalo’s downtown is supported by the overview of innovative tech firms within the region. The research indicates that downtown has the largest concentration of existing innovative firms. With established innovative energy, it’s clear that this location offers

the most potential to be a catalyst to attract additional innovative firms and ultimately establish a successful ID.

buildings, and vacant land), 10. Vacancy rate (land and buildings), and 11. Opportunity zone.

A core ID’s size needs to be relatively small in order to foster an ID’s desirable high concentration of innovation and mixed-use proponents. Each district would be between 50- and 100-acres to allow for dense development and to create the condensed environment necessary for collaborative innovation. The rubric was developed using case study research as well as ideas from local leaders, both private and public. A variety of desired ID characteristics were outlined, resulting in eleven distinct rubric categories: 1. Innovation firms, 2. Mixed-use, 3. Nearby activity centers, 4. Anchors (institutional and business), 5. Infrastructure, 6. “Funky index,” 7. Density, 8. Housing as the percent of all uses (square feet), 9. Property value (occupied buildings, vacant

Through this process, Lafayette Square was found to be the best location to host an ID as it received the highest score on the district innovation rubric. Overall, the boundaries drawn around the core districts in this research were specifically for analytical purposes. These boundaries are flexible and can be drawn differently in a way that finds the best balance of the advantages and disadvantages between Lower Main and Lafayette Square.

Now the time comes for Buffalo’s and Western New York’s leaders and informed citizens to weigh in on the creation of an ID.

MSRED student Vita Wu presenting in Hayes Hall

(Excerpts taken from student report, Feasibility Assessment of an Innovation District in Buffalo)

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incubator

Students: inclusive design studio fall 2019; ARC 605 38

The Inclusive Design studio focused on developing a student oriented, small business incubator to foster creativity and entrepreneurism at UB. The designs were tailored to meet the needs of different “personas” for an imagined incubator design team through the use of inclusive strategies. As the program mainly revolved around research, development, and collaboration, students had to understand how architectural space can influence innovation and creative thinking.

WELLNESS HUB Wellness HUB is both a wellness and innovation center that extends off of Clark Hall, a gym on the University at Buffalo’s South Campus. This building addition utilizes mass timber construction with a lunawood cladding system on the exterior.

This project addresses both physical and mental health through counseling, mental and physical rehabilitation, and product development. The project aims at encouraging collaboration between architecture, rehab science, and occupational therapy students through the innovation of products relating to the fields of health and rehabilitation.

Faculty:

Jenna Herbert (Wellness HUB), Alexis Zielger (Ideate, Collaborate, Create, Innovate) Edward Steinfeld

Program: MArch

Ziegler promoted health, wellness, and social participation spatially through biophilic design, large gathering spaces, a live roof, private study spaces, and private activity spaces for yoga and meditation. Through the combination of natural materials such as water, wood, and greenery, users are exposed to nature, enhancing their overall health and experience within the space.

The program would also function in tandem with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, through the Buffalo VA Medical Complex. Support and therapy for veterans would be available through PTSD counseling, product testing, and rehabilitation.

IDEATE, COLLABORATE, INNOVATE

CREATE,

This project was conceptually driven by psychological and physical human connection. By creating a physical connection between Crosby Hall and Hayes Hall, a visual transparency is established between different aspects of the school. This connection would provide space for student research and initiative.

Wellness HUB: spaces for communal and private activites

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Wellness HUB: perspective showing the makerspace

Wellness HUB: section showing addition to Clark Hall

The project aims to promote connections between different levels of students, student organizations, faculty, and alumni through a series of circulation systems and work spaces. The incubator includes different zones and scales for student research. There are certain areas for collaboration and mockups, as well as office space for recent graduates who are interested in continuing their own research or staring up their own firms.

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Herbert incorporated inclusive features, including all gender bathrooms and biophilia, into her design to ensure a healthy, productive environment for all users. She also designed to include those with visual impairments by using high contrasting colors, ensuring adequate lighting, and utilizing nonvisual wayfinding techniques.

12.05.2019: This site plan shows the physical connection between Hayes Hall and Crosby Hall.

Ideate, Collaborate, Create, Innovate: rendering of the incubator connection to Hayes Hall

Ideate, Collaborate, Create, Innovate: rendering of connection

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ub cultural campus in madrid Students: spain study abroad program summer 2019 42

The study abroad program in Spain had students design a UB Cultural Campus in Madrid. Due to the site’s position on the threshold of the urban fabric and the natural landscape of the university district, students had to navigate and understand the social, cultural, and built context of the city.

Both Heidi Flores and Rania Moussa, with Microclimate Voronoi, and Yifan He and Xuecheng Cai, with Slope Garden, sought to embrace and connect these two different landscapes. Both designs were highly influenced by the integration of vegetated landscapes as a way to mediate between city and country.

MICROCLIMATE VORONOI Flores and Moussa developed their design by using Voronoi diagramming as their organizational strategy. This partitioning system uses points, or seeds, in a plane to divide that plane into regions, allowing for the creation and analysis of spatial relationships. Voronoi formations are often found, at both macro and micro scales, in natural environments such as cells in a leaf.

Faculty:

Program:

Heidi Flores, Rania Moussa (Microclimate Voronoi), Yifan He, Xuecheng Cai (Slope Garden) Miguel Guitart

BS Arch, MArch

Flores and Moussa used site and program data as seeds, placing them in relation to the site context. They picked locations based on the conditional factors of public versus private, sounds, views, and the amount of sunlight received in different areas. These points and their connections were used to generate Voronoi cells, which became fundamental to the formal and spatial layout for the project.

The cells were further manipulated and multiplied based on programmatic and spatial requirements. The breakdown and division of individual cells opened up opportunities for circulation and a variation in both interior and exterior conditions. The pathways played a critical role in the landscape by creating the transition between city and natural landscape. Pathway thickness varied to define public versus private circulation.

As a means to provide shade and comfortable exterior conditions for Madrid’s hot climate, vegetation was integrated into the design. By using the natural vegetation found throughout the city, the density of plants and trees can change the atmospheric conditions within those areas. These microclimates were designed to provide views, gardens,

Microclimate Voronoi: voronoi development diagram

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Microclimate Voronoi: axonometric of campus

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Slope Garden: model of campus proposal

Slope Garden: elevation showing slope of building and bamboo facade system

and controlled isolation for students in the private spaces. The use of vegetation not only created an isotropic landscape but promoted and embraced a green landscape campus that welcomed and engaged the city.

SLOPE GARDEN He and Cai responded to the site through gradation, using program to transition between and connect these two separate environments. Their design moved

fluidly from loud to quiet, from urban to university.

it meets the lower level of the university district.

The form, as the name Slope Garden suggests, is a physical translation of their conceptual motives. The building responds to the site’s terrain, utilizing the existing sloping grade as a programmatic organizational strategy. Private programs are embedded in the landscape, allowing the roof to fall even with the street on the upper level of the site. As the program transitions from private to semi-public to public, the building gradually slopes until

He and Cai’s design responded to the intense sunlight that the site receives during summer months. An operable bamboo shading system allows users to control the temperature and atmospheric conditions of their interior environments.

The roof becomes a public garden, maximizing green space and providing shaded exterior areas. The garden becomes a direct, physical connection between city and landscape.

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Slope Garden: rendering of courtyard garden space

strange towns

Students: urban design studio spring 2019; ARC 606 46

On May 27, 1962, the coal seam that runs through the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, was ignited by the deliberate burning of trash at the Centralia landfill, located in the pit of a former strip mine.

After two decades of unsuccessful attempts to put out the fire and remediate the site, the town was abandoned—bought out by the federal government, and its buildings subsequently demolished— leaving behind traces of an eroding street grid and an ever-dwindling number of residents that refused relocation. The fire— 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit at its core and advancing at a rate of 50-75 feet per year— still burns today and could continue to do so for another 250 years.

For this studio, students identified and researched ten American towns that pose “strange” situations for architecture and urbanism. The outcome: a series of speculative design proposals that—by pairing the towns—address the particular opportunity posed in one by borrowing from the curious model offered by the other. Final projects focused on imagining alternative futures for five towns (California City, CA; Green Bank, WV; Picher, OK; Madero, TX; and Centralia, PA), promoting strange new ideas of inhabitation, structure, organization, and program.

Faculty:

Samendy Brice, Tierra Bush (Centralia, PA), Tom Foederer (Green Bank, WV), Sylvester Mallardi, Rumaldo Genao (Picher, OK) Gregory Delaney

Program: MArch

CENTRALIA, PA Centralia is a strange town. But what if Centralia was reconceived not as a city for the living, but for the dead? Where the infrastructure for burial was designed to extinguish the fire?

Areas close to Centralia, like Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and New York City, are experiencing a shortage of burial space within their cemeteries. In Centralia, the dead will outnumber the living, and become the new burial center of the eastern region of the US. Brice and Bush propose to transform Centralia into the City of Repose by building a trench structure, which would double as a cemetery, that will extinguish the fire and open up opportunities for Centralia to redevelop. Influenced by one of the former attempts to put out Centralia’s underground fire, four trenches would be placed strategically in the predicted path of the spreading fire.

The proposed trench would be 9,791 feet long and between 450 and 830 feet deep, providing 2,637,914 chambers for burial. Centralia would become a new hub for burial, serving Columbia County

and any areas within a 500-mile radius facing cemetery overcrowding.

GREEN BANK, WV Green Bank is a strange town. Despite being home to the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, it is a place where modern technology is restricted in service to an exploration of the cosmos.

The rural landscape is punctuated by seven large-scale radio telescopes, most notably the 485-foot tall Green Bank Telescope. The telescope has a dish diameter of 328 feet and is in operation 24 hours a day for 362 days of the year.

Situated deep in the heart of Appalachia, the geography of the Green Bank Valley makes the region particularly suitable for practicing radio astronomy, which is why the National Radio Astronomy Organization established the Green Bank Observatory in 1956.

In 1958, the FCC established the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square mile region that required all proposed radio transmitters to be coordinated directly with the GBO. The state and federal legislation can be understood as a series of restrictive zones. Within Zones 3 and 4,

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Centralia, PA: rendering of burial trenches in landscape

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03.14.2019: A collage of a utopic, technology free lifestyle possible in Green Bank, WV.

the GBO actively patrols, measures and documents radio transmissions that are outside of the allowable range.

In Zone 1, any electronic that emits radio frequency is restricted, meaning that no gas-powered cars or wireless electronics are allowed. As the rest of the world becomes increasingly interconnected via technology, the curiosity of Green Bank as a town in radio silence has become all the more compelling.

What if Green Bank adopted a mode of living that both accentuated and maximized the curiosities of the place?

Though Green Bank is optimal for studying radio astronomy, the potential lifestyles that a place technology-free offers are far more extensive. Silent City is conceived in the spirit of the Maharishi University of Management, where an overarching

05.15.2019: Communal farms and gardens sustain the community of Green Bank, WV.

ideology and common belief in a techfree life, centered on the cult object of the Green Bank Telescope, brings together an eclectic cast of people. In this way, Silent City will cater to groups of people ranging from scientists, agriculturists, and artists, to the electromagnetic sensitive, tourists, and those prescribing to the teachings of Vastu Shastra. Rather than deriving a segregated model, all populations live in the same rectangular block, where four different lot sizes afford every person or family a unit of land on which they can explore their own unique interests with autonomy.

The proposed public spaces will draw individuals from across groups throughout the city, thus serving as a melting pot and contributing to the crosspollination of ideas and practices. The potential offerings of each group will then contribute to the self-sustaining nature of

the place, and result in a more realized instantiation of the utopian aspirations of Maharishi Vedic City centered on the cult object of the Green Bank Telescope.

PICHER, OK Picher is a strange town. Consumed by a manmade landscape of toxicity, it is virtually uninhabitable and is among the largest environmental disasters in US history. Established in the early 1920s as a mining town, the area was the source of 75% of all the lead and zinc produced in both WWI and II. As production increased until 1967, large tailings deposits reaching upwards of 16 stories consumed the town.

In 1981 the EPA declared it part of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, located between the Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri borders, as it was too toxic to clean up.

In 1991, the US Army Corps of Engineers found that 98% of the ground in Picher

was severely unstable due to extensive mining. The EPA and the indigenous people of Quapaw began remediation efforts through the excavation of tailings mounds, trucking to Central Mills Repository, placing them in a manmade pond, and then capping, like a landfill.

Defined by disaster, the already severely damaged town saw an EF4 tornado pass through its heart, destroying many of the buildings that remained. In 2009, the closing of the high school and demolition of the remaining commercial structures sealed the town’s fate, leaving Picher the uninhabitable ghost town it is today.

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What if Picher was reimagined as a radical answer to extreme environmental damage, through massive infrastructural design and landscape transformation?

Last Resort is an urban intervention to the toxic landscape of Picher that brings together what was, is, and will be through a massive, yet light touch to the ground.

The proposal takes cues from Picher’s industrial history and current remediation efforts to inform the design of a mechanized infrastructural system that will remediate the Tar Creek Superfund Site.

This one interconnected infrastructural track, spanning roughly 25 miles, negotiates a zone of maximum preservation for Picher on the interior while serving as a guide for the machine that will remediate the exterior, leaving a new urban trace in the landscape.

This infrastructural track acts as a mode of interaction between large scale remediation efforts and those people who are interested in and serious about the environment, remediation, and ecotourism, by providing a platform on which a single building rests. This fully enclosed resort unites visitors and EPA workers through a variety of educational programs.

Picher, OK: rendering of individuals working in the toxic landscape

Collage of student work with Buckminster Fuller

Selections from Ideas and Integreties, 1963; as quoted in Dean Harold Cohen’s master plan for the School of Architecture and Planning, 1975

“There is an effective strategy open to the architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine. Architects might solve design problems of world-resource use before people get into resource troubles. Architects might thus join forces, as do scientists, with the integrity of inter-self accrediting of the respective abilities of each individual on the team. Architects might begin the laboratory pooling of their resource capabilities at the university level.

At present, the architectural schools are under the impression that practicing professional architectural firms want them to produce draftsmen. Architects should tell architectural schools that they also favor research and development in the university (where society has already provided the multi-million dollar facilities). Architects might find themselves returning to participate in research, instead of dreaming about it in their offices.”

“In the advanced technology which this world-planning program is meant to employ in direct benefit to livingry, the parts production tolerances are held to sub-visible dimensions ranging from one-thousandth to one ten-millionth of an inch. Unlike present architectural practices, wherein prints of detailed drawings are translated by masons and carpenters into components with one-fourth inch errors tolerated, the advanced technology makes conceptually schematic drawings with schedules only of dimensions between theoretical points. The dimensioning is subsequently scheduled into the production work by instruments and indexing machines, controlling dimensions far below man’s direct discernment. For the bold new design evolution to win the initiative in employment of the world’s prime resources on behalf of livingry from its preoccupation in weaponry, will require the architectural students not only to employ the most advanced scientific designing techniques, but also to adopt a progressive, comprehensive education in mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics, sociology and general history.”

RESPONSE 11.21.2019

Lukas Fetzko

Grace DeSantis

Michael Hoover Emily Kutil

Kenneth MacKay 52

Christopher Romano

Lukas Fetzko: I understood Fuller was stressing the need for architecture schools to embrace research and crossdisciplinary collaboration in order to address the future problems that he had foreseen, and they actually might be able to acquire funds, with the connection to all these different entities that a private practice would have because a private practice is also concerned with their own profit and making their livelihood on top of design and research. Which, in his opinion, at the time was perhaps not as easy.

Today we see that a lot of offices are creating these R&D departments that are creating really provocative work.

But schools and universities, in general, are also really taking that seriously. And then, a bit more specifically to UB, the School of Architecture and Planning has taken advantage of connections to different departments. The Smart Lab, Media Studies, the IDeA Center, those are the kinds of entities within the school that are starting to connect to other departments and create some really interesting work. The focus on both contemporary technology and research, as well as connecting that research back into the community, has also been, in

my experience, a pretty big focus of the university as well. Interaction with others and other communities is essential.

Think of Banham, and then people such as Dennis Maher, Beth Tauke, Linda Schneekloth, Kory Smith, just to name a few of the people who are really taking their work out of the school, into the city, and into the world.

I think Fuller was proposing the taking up of research by universities and schools because he felt it was necessary. But he also felt that maybe practices could not fulfill that sufficiently and that universities may be able to better handle the needs of a research program.

Christopher Romano: The problem with the text and the problem with the research is that if we position that academia does research and practice does practice, we’ve already created an enormous problem. If we position that design is in research already and that research is something else that’s not the typical kind of understanding of the design and how design education and design thinking unfolds, I’d argue that it is research. Just the minute it’s parsed out, we create all these problems that are disciplinary,

professional, and I think Fuller was understanding them as totally different.

I think your last comment about practices actually creating R&D branches or identifying that they are doing research and that it’s part of the design process is a much more proactive way to discuss the conversation, I think. And to position it in today’s world, because I find that just difficult, like when people say, “What are you researching?” It’s like I’m researching the architectural opportunity on the particular site of the particular program of the particular client. You’re always researching something. Actually, you’re researching too many things as an architect. And you just have to be able to identify some hierarchy between the multiplicity of research trajectories that any design problem has to learn about, so you can properly respond.

And I think that’s how we try and teach our students at both the undergrad and the grad, because I also don’t think we should distinguish between how we teach our undergrads in professional education and how we teach our graduates in a looser kind of GRG structure, because I think that’s just creating more problems than it’s creating answers for, in my personal

opinion. So, I just don’t see it as separate. I don’t think it’s anyone’s responsibility and not someone else’s.

Kenneth MacKay: As you were speaking, I was thinking of Llewelyn Davies. Sir Llewelyn Davies, he was a planner, and our library has a beautiful little book that commemorates his speech at the opening of the School of Environmental Design in Edinburgh, Scotland.

There were many diagrams at that time which show architecture as part of a larger field of endeavors. And so you can begin to look at these historically and say, alright there has become a codification, a kind of privileging of professions. There’s a reaction going on, realizing that the professions are by themselves somewhat isolated, and they need to be opened up. And so schools of architecture and schools of environmental design are opening that up.

to say that futurism and nostalgia are essentially two sides of the same coin.

There’s a nostalgia for something other than where we are. This place, and place itself, is where we should be focused, and that human existence by its nature is kind of disorienting. We’re constantly hit with these outside stimuli and that somehow architecture might place us. And I think that’s a pretty profound statement.

Emily Kutil: In a sense, Fuller is trying to make a case for universities to consider

And a few years ago, I heard someone say, “Buffalo has had a great maker culture.”

It was shocking because the person was quite articulate, but it seemed to me that, logically, there’s kind of violence going on there in which you take contemporary frameworks, and you reinterpret the past in those frameworks, right? So, you have to kind of say many of the things that you were stating, Lukas, are very much on our mind, and I think we have to be very careful about looking into the past and reinterpreting those things in ways that serve us.

Fuller was very, very complex, and my guess is that he was as suspicious of the institutions as he was of the professions.

And I think it would be interesting to hear what he would say today. But things have changed, and you could see within the ‘80s, there was a radical change in which futurism itself started to be questioned.

Aldo van Eyck, for example, started

09.14.2019: Heather Leslie in her Space Wranglers suit collecting a water sample using test tubes and a mini fishing pole. Her Space Wrangler partner, Mitch Mesi used an IR thermometer and a Ketrel 4400 to measure surface, air, and wet bulb temperatures. This project was part of the Ecological Practices Technical Methods course taught by Nicholas Rajkovich.

architects as capable of doing research in a university context. And he’s saying the problem is that architecture schools think that they are supposed to produce draftsmen and that that’s the goal of institutions. So we’re in a really different moment now where the university has fully embraced research. We have graduate research groups, and we have research centers, it’s all about research. And I think it would be useful to start to think about what are the kind of questions that we’re wrestling with now in terms of how we define what counts as research, what’s included within research, what kind of research architects can do, what kinds of research we can’t do. I think a lot of those questions are still alive within the university now.

For example, Chris and I just came from a review from the Ecological Practices technical methods course, where the students were analyzing sites by creating these tools that were supposed to collect data. But they had these really weird tools that spawned all these strange, uncomfortable, funny scenarios, and they were then creating these satire films about. And I think there was a really important layer of subjectivity on the data that they were collecting. In that actually, we ended up realizing that the data they collected was the most limited aspect of what they learned about the site. That their subjective experiences and the weird disjuncture or the strange moments of discomfort were more illuminating than the data. And so I think it raises this question of what are architects good at?

What do we uniquely bring as a discipline to research? And I think now maybe a lot of the conversations that we’re having about how do we include subjectivity, how do we include human experience within the research that we produce, or as Chris was saying, the process of design, the act of design is research.

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I think that those ideas are really different from some of the ideas that Fuller is expressing in this quote, that architects deal with the exterior organisms of man.

I would argue that we deal with far more than the exterior organisms of man and that we’re maybe dealing as much with the interior organisms of man as the exterior organisms.

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Michael Hoover: I think the point you bring up about the interior versus exterior, and sort of how that relates to research is something that I’ve been starting to learn more as I’ve been within the master’s program. What are you curious about?

And how do you spawn that curiosity when you’re learning? As an architecture student, I feel like I’m always researching about everything that I do. How do I relate it to my environment, how does the environment relate to me, what are all these things, and how do you spawn that curiosity and keep it going?

CR: Sometimes, we say experimentation or use the word curious. So that word gets tossed out a lot as a validity of research, like that’s research because you’re experimenting with something.

But I find that as vague as the definition of architectural research. To be experimental, isn’t that just to be creative? Is it to just be curious? Are those the kinds of adjectives that describe what architectural research is?

I think the precision of how one goes about their interests is important.

So research methods I find to be a much better way to kind of talk about architecture. The dilemma that I find is there are traditions of craft-based researchers who operate under trial and error like designers do, test something iteratively and respond to it, and you test it again. It is a non-science-based way of thinking. It’s didactic. It’s empirical.

And I think architecture has operated

like that for thousands of years. And now all of a sudden, we’re not supposed to operate like that. Everyone is hypercritical of these methods of tradition, craft, and experimentation in a much looser sense.

But in some ways, I find those to be better definitions for design research today than some of the other borrowed definitions.

That we take from science or we take from philosophy or we take from some of these other more proven academic methods that maybe the larger university understands as research.

So, I don’t have an answer for what is an acceptable method of research that relates to us as architects. And I think Fuller was sort of interested in industry and technology and bringing in some precision. We kind of have some of that precision now 60, 70 years later. And we certainly embrace the technological part that I think Bucky was really spearheading.

And we also have the industry. We’re sort of heavily industry-supported across many of the large portions of the school. So I do see the influence, I see the heavy influence in some of the things he was pioneering.

KM: But, Chris, in some ways, you're talking about a reversal in which we are respecting the core of architecture and we're borrowing different techniques or experimenting with different techniques.

Where, if you go back to Jeremy Till, in his speech talking about what is research within architecture, one of the myths was that architecture is not architecture. At the beginning of that is where Fuller's writing.

He's writing, and the social sciences are critiquing architecture, saying architecture is not architecture, saying they can tell you whether architecture works or not by using these methods. And so in some ways we have to kind of look at that and how that has changed.

10.02.2019: Katelyn Broat, Deron Charlery, Anita Lin, Jingyu Lu, and Hunter Perez diagrammed the forces of both action and water movement acting on their boat, Flex, as a way to understand the complexities of the human body and how it interacts with its surroundings.

I recently spent some time in Maine. And I did not know that within about ten miles,

that Buckminster Fuller spent his youth on an island in Penobscot Bay. And so this quotation from Fuller is: “My teleological stimulation first grew out of boyhood experiences on a small island eleven miles off the mainland, in Penobscot Bay, in the state of Maine. There, floatable at will, in and out of nature’s tidal dry docks, with a fifteen-foot flood rise twice a day, the boat building was the parent technology and the devices for its original design and fabrication, together with its subsequent sparring, rigging, beaching, wintering, cradling, rebuilding, launching and upkeep, in general, were so broadly effective, as to govern spontaneously almost any technical tasks to be effected on the land, whether this was building of dwellings, barns, well-houses, or watercourse controls.”

I find that kind of amazing because, in a sense, if you take away the beginning where it says “teleological,” which, by definition, is relating to or involving the explanation of phenomenon in terms of the purposes they serve. If we take that away, that’s something that you and I, Chris, have discussed in the development of the junior fall semester studio. That the very process of making boats introduces a whole series of complexities that students have to experiment and work through.

But we have not set an exact cause or purpose at the end, right? In a way, we want to keep that experimentation open.

I think it's important to see the difference between this time now, where the process is intentionally kept more open than in Fuller's time.

LF: On what Chris and Ken were just talking about, there is a critique of stagnation within the field that Fuller is identifying, where universities are just producing draftsmen and not critical thinking. A similar critique is coming up again in a different context, where now things are so open and so broad that

certain things need to be more focused.

Starting to question why we’re doing this research or what is research. There is maybe not a stagnation in what’s being made, but there’s more of a stagnation in the reflection on that or the way to criticize or to be self-critical. I think Fuller was advocating for as well.

Grace DeSantis: I think there is a risk in products not being practical, in using that type of experimental method that’s very open and imaginative. In Fuller’s quote, he says, “The planning program is meant to employ in direct benefit of livingry.”

And I think there is a risk in developing products that don’t provide an ensured direct benefit to the public. So, I don’t know, I guess, that would be my concern with that methodology, especially as urban planners and architects, we’re kind of motivated to build programs and build environments that will serve the public good. I think that’s the benefit of making sure the products are practical and applicable.

KM: But practical is a metric that’s difficult to quantify, and if it’s not quantified ethically, it’s quantified through capitalism at someone’s gain. And so I think that, at the time that Fuller was writing, it was hard to see what that would do to our environments. The counterargument is that kind of experimentation is a relatively small part of the world, and it may provide some dream or desire of a better world that could be implemented by others.

Right now, the prevailing forces that are making our environment aren’t using that.

What’s interesting about Fuller is that like much of structuralist philosophy, there’s already assumed to be a right goal and a wrong goal, but it was never defined. And I think that if the half a dozen decades since has taught us anything, it’s that what has defined it since it has not always been in the public interest or the environment’s interest.

Where his philosophy starts to come back, as being very pertinent, is that we kind of realize the damage. To me, it’s less about universities and research and that structure, which is a financial structure, and more of how we might use some of that wisdom to solve some of the problems that most people could recognize.

“It is a non-sciencebased way of thinking.

It's didactic. And now . . . everyone is hypercritical of these methods of tradition, craft, and experimentation . . . But in some ways, I find those to be better definitions for design research today.”

- chrisTOPHER romano

EK: Yeah, I think that that points to, both Grace’s point and Ken’s point, this other kind of research that’s happening now within architecture schools, which is not crafts-based and which is projective or thinking about the future, and I think I’m curious about the climate research that you do, Grace, and how that fits into architecture schools in the way that we think about making architecture, what architecture’s agency is within the world. I was fixated on this line in the Fuller quote that says, “Architects might solve design problems of the world’s resource use before people get into resource troubles.”

And I think now we’re in this moment where at least many of us maybe now agree like, okay, we’re in this situation, we’re already in resource troubles. So how do we act within that environment, and what are all these different factors that we now need to consider in our design

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work? I wonder if you, Grace, could talk a little bit about the research that you do and how you see that fitting in within this conversation.

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GD: Well, all the research that I do is very cross-disciplinary. In regard to climate change, we work with architects who understand how the built environment affects climate, and we work with planners who understand how people’s actions influence climate. We work with public health scientists who understand how people are impacted, health-wise, by climate change. And so, I think that these worldwide problems architects and designers should be integrating with other disciplines. I’m not sure if that is something that Fuller was thinking about when he wrote this quote. That was always my take.

CR: I don’t think we should think that academia is interdisciplinary, and the world is not. Because in fact, I would say the world is more interdisciplinary. And that’s what Bucky was talking about. He was proposing solutions. He was like a systems-driven inventor who would put out a problem statement, but then give you a kind of system, a tectonic that was industry-made, that was uber precise, that could move through the capitalist industrial structures of the world at the time. And I think that’s what architects don’t do so well right now.

We know what the problems are, climate change, energy crisis, shortage of housing.

Everyone generally agrees, but no one has proposed viable solutions in the way that Fuller was really trying to put out actual systems that were somewhat viable.

Now, we sit around, and we talk about the problems, we think about the problems.

Take all of academia, and that’s kind of the biggest issue, we’re alienating ourselves further and further from those

industries that could actually shift the direction. And I think that’s a major, major problem, and I think that’s what Fuller was the best at pushing through. He held all the patents for these systems. He kind of understood it down to the microscopic level. And it wasn’t just architecture. He had to engage 15 disciplines in order to do that, but he was somehow able to do that himself. Which I think is the problem we have today, no one person can do that anymore.

KM: Well, he was a master of the medium so he could project that message. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I do think we need to recognize that socially there’s a great deal of isolation. There are people who will not recognize the problems that you’ve just been talking about. It would pretty amazing if someone could look at new ways of solving these problems and propose them in such a way that they are discussed in a larger venue. To me, that’s even more effective than a series of grants within a university, which often get tied to political structures. So that’s where I’m saying that the problems can’t be directly addressed because the forces out there are just too hard, they’re just too solidified, to be overcome. But, an imaginative solution may get people to re-imagine and to understand what the problem is.

EK: I think we don’t give ourselves the permission, maybe, to try to imagine solutions enough or that we don’t acknowledge that working with people in the world who are embedded within these issues in a kind of live way is maybe one of the only ways to actually impact things. That sitting in this room, and making drawings is maybe not going to really start to actually get to the question of solutions. But I disagree that we all understand the problems. I actually don’t think that we understand the problems with enough nuance. I think that saying that we don’t need to represent them, that

we understand them, I think is missing the messy reality of working in the world on those problems.

As an example, I do a lot of work on water infrastructure in Michigan, and most of it is totally interdisciplinary. There’s usually not a single other architect in the room.

But at the same time, everyone has their lens on the issue. And you’re also working with a lot of politicians, and there is a lot of turnover and different agendas on the table, but I think that you find when you’re actually in those situations that everyone understands what the problem

“by Understanding the limitations of individuals within this worldwide, evolving conversation that we're part of . . . i can trust that there are other people out there who are thinking in different ways and from different angles about these questions.”

- EMILY KUTIL

is completely differently, and that often people are totally misdiagnosing what the actual issues are, or prioritizing their own agenda over all of these other agendas that should matter.

And so I think that representation can play a role in sifting out those complexities and agendas and different understandings of these issues that we’re facing that are incredibly complex. So I think there is a role for representation there. There is a role for architects there, and I think saying we should just be switching to problem-solving instead of trying to

further untangle these really rich, complex questions is missing the mark a little bit.

CR: We spend a lot of time constructing images right now, constructing the images of the situations, but there’s still no one left to actually work on the solutions for them. So I think we’ve become like other disciplines where we just talk about the problems, and it becomes political. And I think it removes itself from an architectural context a bit too quickly. When you’re out there, architects are thought of as representing the complexities of the world’s issues. It’s also a way to limit architecture’s influence quite a bit to just creating a representation, an image of the issue. People need to do it, but I don’t know what the impact of that or the future of that is.

KM: The impact, if we look at some of Fuller’s proposals, is to shift the conversation, to focus the conversation on the potential solutions. And so it may not be that that’s the solution, that we really want a bubble over New York City, but it opened up a conversation for a decade or so about climate and controlling climates.

In a way, one could say that it was taking the idea of controlled climates and expanding it to its absurdity, which then opens up that discussion. But that’s kind of where I was going before, that somehow attempting to solve the problem directly can often be incredibly complex because there’s no larger conversation that people can engage in. And I would say climate change is something that right now is being presented to us through a series of disasters. But in many places, there is a segment of the population that is not affected by it. One can imagine a Buckminster Fuller-like person that has that talent to project themselves, and their potential projects out there might open that conversation up.

EK: One of the things that I find really encouraging about our current moment in contrast to the moment in which Fuller was writing as this kind of single, heroic, genius man who would do all of these different things and surf the capitalist markets of product creation and get all these things out there, is that we don’t really see the world in that way now. We don’t really care about those heroes anymore, or at least many of us don’t.

And so I think I take a certain kind of comfort in that we can work in many ways, and that it’s going to take many different perspectives about what architecture can do and be and create in the world, that’s what its agency is. Some of us can work in one way, and some of us can focus on representing complex issues, and others can invent new systems and that those things can somehow be a part of a larger conversation. You can trust that your own work doesn’t have to consume the world, and your own work doesn’t have to solve climate change, because that’s just impossible.

By understanding the limitations of individuals within this worldwide, evolving conversation that we’re part of, it at least tamps down my anxiety a little because it makes me feel like I don’t personally have to take on every single thing at once, that I can trust that there are other people out there who are thinking in different ways and from different angles about these questions.

LF: That, I think, is where I see the mindset shifting in that transition. It still seems like the stuff that Fuller was talking about, that this sort of jack-of-all-trades person who can do all this stuff themselves, is a mindset that is still being carried over with this openness of option. Because you could do anything, people still try to do everything. And I think what Emily was saying about how, now, because you

can do anything, you can be a bit more tuned, a bit more specific, more focused, relinquishing that desire to be able to pull all these strings, and actually that more collaborative mindset is where, I think, the discussion should be going.

I think Emily is saying that it’s kind of going there already. But it does seem like there’s a latent or residual mindset of, “I still need to solve all the problems instead of being just a portion of the solution.”

And I think that maybe comes through in some of the Starchitects. Your first exposure to architecture is through people like Frank Lloyd Wright, who wanted to design the whole world to work in a specific way. That really forms your mindset, and I think that’s where the school comes in, we start to question those perspectives, and I think that UB has done that in my experience. I think there’s an equal part of saying, “Let’s try to understand the problem more intentionally than we would normally.”

And then, in a different context, “Let’s actually try out an option or a solution and see what that does.”

So I think there is a pretty good balance between those that I’ve experienced here at least. And I think that just comes from the variety of the faculty.

KM: I think this school has always been a bit different, historically, than other schools. Just an aside, we don’t talk about World’s Fairs anymore, but that was a vehicle for the future of the world. These were the solutions. But even, I think, by the time that this school opened, the connections were with the Independent Group, Team 10. Those kinds of visions come out of group collaboration. There was always in the history of this school from its beginning an attempt to look at architecture in a very different way.

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CR: I agree. There’s never going to be another Bucky Fuller. But I do think we have to have the ambitions to be like Bucky Fuller. And yes, it’s going to be done collaboratively through a multiplicity of thinkers and some other kind of structure of team and collaboration. But I think the way we’re training people still is with the same ambitions that Bucky had.

And I think that it’s super important to be able to create that kind of statement, but then also deliver the kind of system.

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KM: I think this school should take pride in the fact that the number one priority has not been producing architects to go directly into practice, but producing architects that will leave here within that type of ambition.

It’s interesting to discuss where is the next Buckminster Fuller, or the impact of that type of work. And I would say that it really would be a series of images that reveal things that some of us understand, but many people are ignoring. So it may not be exactly architecture, but diagrams or representations of changes in climate.

You’re starting to see a bit more of that on the internet, in sophisticated ways that you never saw before, ways of showing how things have changed over time within an area. Maybe that’s where the future is.

I think that ties into what you're saying, that it may not be the big idea of having New York City under the geodesic dome.

It may be the image that shows how a city has changed environmentally over the last 100 years in the graphic that almost everyone can understand, the way they could understand that geodesic dome over the City.

MH: How do you communicate these sorts of problems? How can you make that small graphic or how can you make that small change within our own

environment, how that might act as a catalyst to the rest of the nation or the globe?

And I think that’s something that I really value here at UB, the involvement within Buffalo and trying to get out there, trying to help different people. How can you do those things within your own community, bring that consciousness around, and bring that spirit and sort of drive those ideas forward? I think that’s something that I really value with what I’ve been learning here.

CR: My worries with that are it could take 100 years to convince the world what to do – that it will be too late. Because then we’ve spent our lives, 80 years, an entire life span trying to convince a world that doesn’t want to be convinced that we need to react versus spending a life reacting at whatever scale of impact we can. You affect it through your actions.

EK: Okay, I think you can do both, though.

Representations aren’t inert, right? I mean maybe sometimes in architecture school we feel that way. You pin that up on the wall, and then you throw it away, and they never go anywhere. And I can understand that. But I do think that thinking about ways to send them out of the school, so they aren’t born and live and die in this building. Proposing physical systems or proposing some kind of new building system or something, that’s a concrete way that you could develop something, you can put it on the market, you could try and get as many people to build with it as possible. That’s a way that you could concretely respond.

But I think that there are ways that we can engage with the world beyond architecture. You can make representations in collaboration with an organization that’s using them to advocate for a political change, for example. And that

is something that actually does have a concrete impact on the world. It might not change the way that we make buildings, but I think that there are real ways that these kinds of representations can actually act on the world in a more immediate way than a kind of 100-year time span. I think there’s a kind of a gray area there.

LF: I think that’s where the intensity of Fuller can come back, where you’re training architects and designers to have the ability to work at the scale or at the reach of a Fuller-type person, but they have the self-control to understand when they actually can shift these focuses. It’s not a life spent trying to do one thing, but it’s different pieces that can ebb and flow through these different contexts and operations.

And I think that’s where the architects are much more understanding of their own role within the world, regardless of what it is specifically. I think that selfawareness is becoming more important.

CR: I think that’s a really good way to summarize some of the things that Emily’s saying, some of the things that I’m trying to say, that the multi-scale approach of the molecular scale, but also at other times the galactic scale, the global scale.

And my perspective in terms of Fuller as a thinker was that he was able to move laterally across those scales incredibly fluidly, maybe one of the best at that. And maybe that’s where the domain of the architect has that ability to know when to leverage a particular scale as an argument, a scale as a thing gives architects the most potency in trying to be transformative, to shift the cultural conversation into a more real, current situation, as a response to the kinds of challenges we have.

LF: Yeah, the lack of inhibition that Fuller had. He was so willing to try out these things and propose these things even if

they weren’t the best solution. People are more concerned about doing something wrong or failing. People have been worried about actually producing stuff or trying to define the problem because of how quickly things can be critiqued and be returned back to you. That ability to just be more fearless actually then is allowing you to shift between these different scales. Yeah, creating fearless designers, I would say, is something I think all architecture schools need to do.

EK: I think this question of fear is really interesting, that there’s an element of fear that students experience, maybe in proposing ideas that they know aren’t the best. That if you put an idea out there, it might not be the best, and you might get shot down. And I think that that sensibility also speaks to this ultra-connected moment that we’re living in now. There are so many more voices involved.

And it also speaks to your point about the kind of complexity to breaking into some kind of industry or getting a product out there in the world. And I think we're dealing with a more complex environment, both in terms of the market and the discourse around architecture.

What does that mean for the way that we teach architecture? Is it possible or useful to teach students to be fearless? How does that work within the world that we’re in right now?

CR: Well, it's kind of like this dilemma with the world. You have to find ways to confront that fear. Or to maybe get students to radicalize their own responses to the briefs we come up with and to the questions we ask them, which I think we often are trapped in this sort of interconnectivity, it’s also ultra-conservative. Everyone tiptoes around the world because we don’t want to offend anyone. You can paint a million scenarios of confrontation. But I do feel like as educators, as practitioners, and

as researchers, we have to find methods to confront those, or maybe define those fears first. And then come up with pedagogical structures and research structures and professional structures to actually be more catalytic with a method to interrogate those.

KM: To me, some of these issues are interesting to reflect on how Fuller would have dealt with that because it was a much more open market, relative to media when he was working. Now, one or two of his projects would immediately be put out there and be segmented on this

“We can address the specific problem we’ve been asked to solve and do it in such a way that is evocative, that changes the way people think. That, for me, is the power of the architect.”

- Kenneth Mackay

political spectrum and, therefore, almost automatically, would be rejected by the other side because of the proposal. And so this whole idea, we’re teaching students to be technically competent, creative in the way that they solve a problem.

But it may be that what we haven’t yet addressed is, this other, how does it get out there? How is this being projected?

Because it’s never neutral.

LF: I think the interaction with these instantaneous feedback systems could actually provide really interesting opportunities on the part of the designer

to actually kind of humble them. Kind of question their own decisions. You put something out there, and people are like, “Oh, this is terrible, this is horrible.”

And I think the first thing you want to do is be like, “Well, I went to architecture school for six years. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But maybe that then provides an opportunity to pause and be like, wait hold up, who is this person? Maybe they live in that neighborhood or something?

Now that can open a dialog and actually produce that next round of solutions much more quickly or help identify the problem and create this more dynamic system of interactions and producing and envisioning stuff like that. And people are so defensive, right? So worried about getting that negative feedback or being questioned. And I’m sure architects are no less immune to that.

And I think maybe there are opportunities to actually really face that fear, right? The fear of that rejection, or of critique head-on from outside of the field, which I think is relatively much newer in its current form, than in the past, where things might have been kept more within the architecture field.

But now I think we’re not really making things for the architecture field as much, in terms of how it’s being received. The feedback we’re getting is more from outside of that.

Is anyone afraid that problems are too big that architecture can’t solve them?

KM: I’m not saying that we need to solve the big problem. But we can address the specific problem we’ve been asked to solve and do it in such a way that is evocative, that changes the way people think. That, for me, is the power of the architect. And that’s where I’m saying that

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it’s how the projects are presented that have the potential to change. And so if you’re only solving the so-called practical problems, you’re simply working within a box, every year we’ll see great projects that expand the way we think about architecture. And if that takes us in the direction that people see it and say, you know, that’s a solution, and we should be doing more of that. Right?

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Because what's the solution that's being solved by, a thousand suburban homes being built in this country? Right? You know, about 20 years ago, it occurred to me that Buffalo did not need another new home. 250 to 300 homes have been built in Buffalo and the surrounding area since then, and what has it created? It's created segregation, it's created problems relative to infrastructure. In it's own small way it has contributed to climate change. In some way, we need a solution, an image of a solution, or a solution that gets put out there that will create the desire for people to live in other ways.

EK: I’ve been reading this book recently called “Staying with the Trouble” by Donna Haraway, and I’ve been thinking about this question that you posed a lot recently.

We’re just architects, how do we relate to these giant questions like climate change?

Which, you know, we’re not going to stop somehow through the magic of architecture. The idea of “Staying with the Trouble” is that we’re not going to be able to stop these processes completely, we can’t even predict exactly what’s going to happen. We don’t know. Even our climate research has all kinds of limitations.

And so the idea of “Staying with the Trouble” is that we’re kind of, we’re in it, right? We’re in the trouble, and it’s going to keep developing, and it’s going to keep changing. And our role, as agents within that world, is to stay with it and to keep working, to try things and try to sustain life

in whatever way we can with whatever kind of lens that we have.

the way Bucky thought about it in the ‘60s, ‘50s, so to speak.

And you can create alliances within that, you can work as collectives, but having the idea that we’re going to somehow stop climate change or solve it, or even solve a portion of that problem, is kind of folly. But we can act in all sorts of ways at all sorts of scales, and I think that that’s incredibly empowering when you think about it in that way.

I don’t know if that would work today, maybe that’s what your point is. So we have to kind of adapt to a different notion of collaborative, of collective, of scale, or of influencer, protagonist, visualizer, sort of like these other kinds of politicians, arguably.

CR: I think Bucky would probably try and build another version of the Dymaxion House. He reacted to suburbia, reacted to the issue of like the American Dream. He actually put out a prototype. Now, I don’t disagree. Your statement is kind of on par with what’s probably going to happen.

That’s the solution that’s going to happen.

I’m trying to think like Bucky because we were asked to think like Bucky, and this is fun. [laughter] And I’ve enjoyed this with everyone. So would he put out a built prototype in Buffalo, New York that somehow could tap into the larger question of climate change and hope that enough people would see it? Because, frankly, most of the world doesn’t understand drawings, they don’t understand the things we make. I find that to be the biggest challenge or hurdle, we draw something, and no one gets it. You have to show them, you have to have a kind of artifact. And then enough people would see, and then someone in the industry or a business owner would adopt it as the solution. And they would work on implementation at a grander scale to address this giant problem.

I’m always trying to ask at what scale should the architect try and engage the conversation to affect a change over the course of one lifetime. And I think that is

EK: Just if there’s room for that, I think.

That maybe it’s not like we should all do this, right?

CR: Right, right.

EK: Which is one of the things that I really appreciate about this school, actually. I’ve only been here for three or four months, but I think that there are really quite a lot of different voices at this school. Quite a lot of different ways of thinking about what architecture can do and be and what its agency is, and I think that that’s actually —this may come as a surprise to the students—but that’s actually kind of rare in architecture schools. There’s often an overarching idea about what architecture is that everyone tries to conform to in some ways. And I think that this school does a really good job of exposing a really wide range of ways of thinking about these problems to students.

MH: I started in environmental design, and I was in a different world for a while.

I always had this aspiration to be an architect, but I wasn’t sure, so I’ve really only been in the architecture world for three years now. And then, it’s just all of this information from different angles always coming at me. I’ll have studio with one professor, and I’ll be like, okay, this is the way to do it. And then I have studio with a different professor, and it’s completely the opposite. But then, you kind of find this middle ground and you’re like, okay, what do I believe in all of this,

and how can I make an impact with all this different information?

How do you distill that in your own way to project it into the world? I want to always aspire to be a Bucky. I think, as a student, I always want to have that ambition. Even though I can’t solve all the problems, you have to aspire to be that way, even though you might fall short, and that’s what I’ve been learning through this whole process.

I think we should all aspire to have that control of knowing where you can hone in and where to have that farsightedness that Bucky had. It’s about learning to have an ever-present scalar thought process.

MODERATOR LUKAS FETZKO: MArch Student PARTICIPANTS GRACE DESANTIS: MUP Student

MICHAEL HOOVER: MArch Student

EMILY KUTIL: Banham Fellow (2019-2020), Adjunct Professor - Department of Architecture KENNETH MACKAY: Clinical Associate Professor Department of Architecture CHRISTOPHER ROMANO: Assistant Professor Department of Architecture

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thick skin

Students: ecological practices studio spring 2019; ARC 606 62

The Ecological Practices Graduate Research studio designed experimental bioclimatic façade installations that address the role of the architectural surface in the building’s adaptation to its local ecology and its ability to provide ecosystem services. Students explored tectonics of active and passive systems as a way to raise questions of environmental regeneration, resilience, and adaptability in the context of contemporary building ecologies.

These reimagined infrastructures are derived from the intertwined relationship of natural processes and man-made constructs found in biophilia and biomimicry, aimed at breaking down the distinction between natural and synthetic.

The design and manufacture of these terra cotta assemblies were opportunities to reconsider the role of ornament in both socio-cultural and environmental “performance.”

The studio partnered with the UB SMART Factory, Boston Valley, and the Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop 2019 as they explored the craft and industry of architectural terracotta.

Their research focused on ceramic material systems that combined both

Faculty:

Ashley Chiffy, Alexandrea Volungus (Bio|Sphere), Zach Fields, Sara Svisco (Bee-Havior), Ivan Todd, Jarrett Trudeau (Hexo-Scallop) Laura Garófalo-Kahn

Program: MArch

traditional and digital manufacturing technologies, and bioclimatic design speculation.

BIO|SPHERE Chiffy and Volungus’ assembly Bio|Sphere combines the principles of evaporative coolers and the Venturi effect in a proposal to provide adequate cooling to eliminate the need for conventional air conditioners and the negative impacts they have on the environment.

Indentations on the spherical lobes of the back-to-back tiles hold water to provide evaporative cooling as air flows through the facade.

Sitting back to back, the tiles create full spheres. The gradation in the size and separation of the spheres, from small on the outside to large on the inside, compresses the air as it is pulled through the façade, utilizing the Venturi effect.

The tiled facade would be pulled away from the window facade to allow the air to pass through. The ideal building utilizing this system would have windows Bio |Sphere: drawings and mockup

on opposite facades to allow for cross ventilation, maximizing air circulation.

BEE-HAVIOR Fields and Svisco explored how to restore the habitat of solitary bees. Solitary bees comprise 90% of the bee population and pollinate 70% of the food we eat.

This system provides solitary bees with nesting sites, food sources, and shelter through the design of three different types of tile designs. Nesting tiles have a series of holes, ranging from 3/32” to 1/2” in diameter and 3” to 6” in-depth, which correlate with differently sized types of bees. These holes provide space for the bees to store pollen and nectar and shelter for their eggs and growing larvae.

The planter tiles provide the bees with food sources and pollen. Various pollinator

Bio|Sphere: photo of mockup

plants, such as Lanceleaf Coreopsis and Butterfly Milkweed, are planted in different planter tiles. The nesting tiles and planter tiles are systematically arranged based on nesting radii. A surface tile was developed to act as a connection between the two.

A UV-reflective ceramics glaze, which is visible to humans only under blacklight, attracts bees to the facade. The patterning of this glaze on the facade is arrayed similarly to a field of wildflowers, with the glaze resembling the “bullseye” of a flower, which attracts the bees to its pollen.

The form is designed to aid in a continuous flow of water from the top to the bottom of each tile with the UVreflective glaze located only on the opposite side of the water flow. This ensures that bees are never attracted to potentially harmful areas.

Bee-Havior: removing a module from its mold

HEXO-SCALLOP Trudeau and Todd investigated the integration of passive strategies, such as solar shading, solar retention, rainwater collection, and habitat. Their system adapted based on which direction the façade faced. For the south face, they created a Trombe wall by designing a layered wall system with modules suited to thermal gain. On the north face, the tiles were arranged to provide vertical shading while still allowing for daylight access.

The east and west faces addressed habitat and water retention. They developed a set of planter tiles to be interspersed between tiles designed specifically for bird habitation. Rainwater is collected in a water retention system after filtering through the planters along the façade.

Bee-Havior: photo of mockup

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05.24.2019: Fields and Svisco studied different hole size and depths prefered by different bees, as well as maximum bee travel distances, as they designed Bee-Havior.

Three types of bird habitation tiles were developed after an analysis of different migratory birds and their preferred habitat and nesting tendencies. Tiles were designed to accommodate shrub and tree nesters, cliff nesters, and ground nesters.

The design tailors to five specific species of birds: Purple Martins, Barn Swallows, Black-Capped Chickadees, American Robins, and House Finches. Some will occupy the tiles year-round, and others only seasonally. The birds require different nesting conditions, provided by the tile

modules. The anticipated community of birds will allow for observations of bird songs and flight patterns, providing unique interspecies social conditions between birds and humans.

By creating a faรงade system that doubles as a habitat, Trudeau and Todd connect urban life to nature. Bringing these different ecosystems together allows for observation and educational opportunities.

Hexo-Scallop: wall section showing spatial interactions between humans and birds (left); bird nesting diagram (right)

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urban life: self & society Students:

senior housing competition fall 2019; ARC 403 66

Faculty: Team: Program:

Autumn Bender, Marissa Hayden (Streetwise), Eryn Conlon, Dylan Russ (AutoConnect) Joyce Hwang, Omar Khan Joyce Hwang, Omar Khan, Annette LeCuyer (coordinator), Erkin Özay BS Arch

The driving force of cities arises from collective energy, which often results in a challenge of balance between public and private realms, an issue that becomes central in the design of urban housing.

This senior studio focused on the urban dwelling as a threshold between self and society, local and global, and nature and culture. Students were challenged to think of these conditions as symbiotic, rather than opposites, with relationships that flux with scale, from room to building, neighborhood, city, and natural environment.

architectural proposal within a conceptual framework that works at multiple scales; sharpen critical awareness of the interaction between aesthetic, technical, social, cultural, political, and economic values in the shaping of architecture; investigate conventions regarding public and private space in the city; explore relationships between form and meaning, type and context, function and materiality; and understand the formal, spatial, and conceptual potential of materials and construction assemblies and the interplay of multiple ordering systems.

Students worked in teams to develop a critical position based on an understanding of current socio-cultural, environmental conditions, and speculation about the future. Each team designed a mixed-use scheme for Queens, New York, that included residential units and a public or semi-public program of their choosing, which was developed to ‘charge’ the conceptual strategy of the project. In this way, each team shaped the project to reflect their interests and to grapple with a current social, economic, or cultural issue, resulting in a diverse range of proposals.

As usual, the senior studio culminated as a design competition.

The goals of this studio were to develop the ability to formulate a site-specific

STREETWISE Streetwise, proposed by Autumn Bender and Marissa Hayden, seeks to create a safer environment for children in urban areas. During non-school hours, one in five New York City children are left unattended due to undesirable living conditions or the effect of parent or guardian’s long working hours. Streetwise addresses this issue by offering free recreational programs to the public, shifting children off the streets and into a safer environment. The programs

are available through a co-op system; educators of all kinds are incentivized to live and teach, utilizing underused skills and giving back to the community.

Their design draws on Jane Jacobs’ concepts of urban observation, “eyes on the street.” The idea is that streets convey a sense of safety when there are people around, whether on the street or in their homes, looking out for their neighbors and community. Streetwise reflected this theory through the design of its residential housing. Apartments were tiered on top of the public program, allowing residents to look down on the artificial street. This becomes important as a safety feature when children will be occupying this space as an afterschool educational area.

These ‘streets’ that carve between the residential buildings act as social thresholds. The public ‘street’ opens up to the urban fabric, directly connecting to the surrounding streets and allowing for an intense fluctuation of social interactions. The residential, public area was designed solely for the community of residents, allowing for interactions between residents.

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Streetwise: perspective of interior communal space (top); sectional diagram showing “eyes on the street� concept (bottom)

AUTOCONNECT Russ and Conlon began their project by researching different forms of transportation and travel times between major cities on the east and west coasts.

This led to speculation on the future of transportation and how that can redefine the relationship between travel, cities, and architecture.

AutoConnect proposes a new “smart� infrastructure for domestic travel through a network of ultramodern hotel facilities serving major cities throughout the United States. At its Forest Hills, Queens, location, AutoConnect offers 84 stationary SmartSuite units designed specifically for the autonomous SmartPod to plug into.

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AutoConnect: rendering of the SmartSuite corridor

Each SmartSuite is equipped with a P.V. window and a solar panel, which generate energy for a SmartPod charging station.

Building circulation is designed around the movement of the SmartPod as it brings people in and out of the building, between rooms, and to the social gathering spaces within the building.

The autonomous SmartPod is a newly emerging form of hospitality that blends transportation and hospitality into a single form. The SmartPod is a driverless, door-to-door service equipped with basic sleeping, working, and washroom facilities. This travel method allows for flexible arrival and departure schedules, higher energy efficiency, lower costs, total privacy, and, above all, comfort.

AutoConnect: rendering of the bionic rooftop bar

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AutoConnect: diagram showing a typical smart suite, a typical floorplan, and a smartpod

a home for C.R.A.P.

sophomore studio spring 2019; ARC 202 70

Through a series of introspective design exercises, students generated new designs by exploring the fragments of their architectural past that are omitted from the history they typically highlight in a polished portfolio of their best finished work. This studio was an opportunity for students to reflect on their architectural life thus far by unearthing and resuscitating forgotten, dismissed, or repressed experiences.

Students were challenged to apply the Situationist understanding of architecture as an experimental space as a provocation to design a permanent home for their Collection of Repressed Architectural Pasts (C.R.A.P.) and to remark on the possible outcomes of a design fashioned from the casual fragments of everyday life.

Beckingham’s memories included: learning to define routes through the disorienting streets of Venice, where Google Maps felt virtually useless; the countless trips up and downstairs while carrying dimensional lumber into the basement of Crosby; the multiple modes of climbing her group’s Ritual Space from freshman studio; and the chaotic patterns of movement in the Fabrication Workshop in Parker Hall.

Students:

Lauren Beckingham

Team:

Mustafa Faruki, Joyce Hwang

Faculty:

Program:

Joyce Hwang

BS Arch

Beckingham created a wearable device as an artifact that recreated feelings of disorientation through the use of mirrors and views.

These ideas influenced the design of a Navigation Museum, where stairs and periscopes are used strategically to create a disorienting environment. Beckingham sought to recreate the experience of walking through an unfamiliar place while challenging visitors to reach a level of familiarity with the museum. Visitors must rely on memorization and human navigation skills, without the assistance of handheld smart devices, to return to specific places. The exhibition provides visitors with a variety of views that influence each individual’s experience and movement through the space.

05.15.2019: Beckingham created a wearable, periscopeesque device that could recreate the feeling of being disoriented or lost through an experimentation with mirrors and views.

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representation of Beckingham’s experience in Venice

borrowed spaces

situated technologies studio fall 2019; ARC 605 72

Students: Faculty: Program:

Rossella Giangreco-Marotta Nicholas Bruscia MArch

This Situated Technologies Graduate Research studio spent the semester experimenting with thin, plywood-core, composite shell structures. The work drew on the material-driven logic of pinch-bending wooden sheets and the material composition of lightweight, composite surfaces. The proposal to geometrically combine plywood sheets without the requirement of a frame was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Plydome experiments.

In 2017, there were over 30 million new internally displaced people (IDP) associated with conflict and disasters across 143 countries and territories. The average number of recorded natural disasters per year has risen dramatically since the mid-20th century, with extreme weather and flooding accounting for the majority. It is now common for major disasters to displace a population large enough to form a town, but these are towns of borrowed spaces.

Students used papercutting form-finding techniques as a way to produce selfsupporting composites without the need for a large complex mold. The majority of the term was spent on both physical and digital form-finding of bent and pinched sheets, while also devising layering and panelization schemes to test how this method could scale up to form spatial partitions and enclosures.

Internal displacement from sudden onset disasters requires an immediate response in the form of telecommunications, shelter, health and nutrition, and personal safety. This studio studied the architecture of that response by situating recent technological advancements in materials and off-site manufacturing within the context of IDP settlements.

The material prototyping was supported by the Nohmura Foundation for Membrane Structure’s Technology. The designs were driven by an attempt to improve the spatial quality of disaster relief partitions in open, densely packed, interior environments.

The studio researched the history of migration and indigenous nomadic dwellings from a range of climatic conditions for inspiration, both as social clusters and as purely formal, structural, and material artifacts. By adopting flat-toform geometric techniques, thin sheet materials were converted into organized spaces that could be easily transported

students weaving plywood into its final form

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detail photo of final mockup

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Grain Direction

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Advanced digital modeling and visual programming methods enabled aA quick A A A organization of forces, and an iterative simulation of the results, to accurately model the complex characteristics of flexible materials.

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1" 3'-94

1" 3'-94

The prototype created aims to divide A space for IDP, while maintaining privacy and providing placement of as many beds as possible. The flat, unassembled sheet can be efficiently transported and easily assembled on site. The unique shape of the panels can be configured and sewn together to create three different possibilities: a continuous wall, anA A enclosed pod, or a doorway.

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8'

and assembled. Knitted or woven textile A A A A reinforced composites and bendable plywood surfaces were of particular interest due to their strength-to-weight ratio and ability to quickly transition from a flat plane to a three-dimensional form.

1

1'-37 8"

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1'-37 8"

The continuous wall creates deep shells for the placement of beds, allows visual privacy when sleeping, and creates

corridorsA that help to diffuse sound. The enclosed pod occurs at the end of each wall. It is created by keeping the direction of the fold the same for four consecutive folds and allows for additional privacy or storage space when needed. The door is created by skipping a seam and then continuing the fold pattern, which flips the orientation of the shells and creates an opening that allows for movement between corridors.

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3'-113 8"

1/4” ø Bolt Holes

°

3'-9 1" 4

2'-9 11 16 "

90

3" 4'-2 4

9" 3'-916

160°

160°

7'-11"

9 1/4” ø

90

°

1 1/16” ø Grommet Holes

1/8 ø Fabric Holes detail drawing of single component

12.11.2019: After being cut, the plywood was pulled into shape through bolts and stitches.

Shell

Enclosed Pod

Door

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elevation illustrates how the module could be deployed spatially 1" 3'-94

1" 3'-94

A1

A1

A2

A2

A2

A1

A1

A1

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A1

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8'

A2

A1

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A2 1'-37 8"

8'

1'-37 8"

1" 3'-94

A 3'-113 8"

A2

A2

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A1

A 1/4” ø Bolt Holes

A1

8'

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Grain Direction

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1'-37 8"

°

90

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A1 1'-37 8"

drawing set illustrates the aggregation of components

11 16 "

Grain Direction

Grain Direction

1" 3'-94

health & the built environment

community health and food systems seminar fall 2019; URP 605 76

Students: Faculty:

Tyler Madell

Samina Raja

Program: MUP

Picture a typical American city: How do most people undergo their commute or otherwise travel? Most likely, in this typical American city, its residents prefer the automobile. According to the 2017 American Community Survey, a vast majority of people commute by car in the city of Buffalo, New York, with 67.2% of people driving alone and 11.2% of people carpooling.

Meanwhile, rates of active transportation for commuting are at 1.1% for commute by bicycle and 5.7% for walking, and 11.5% of people commute by public transportation (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). After all, the built environment makes driving seemingly the most convenient, with ample free or cheap parking and very little on most roads to suggest that they are built for anything but vehicles.

Despite the prominence of the automobile in American cities, the benefits of active transportation are increasingly recognized.

Active transportation – which for the purposes of this paper will focus on bicycling and walking – has been associated with a variety of health benefits by inserting regular physical activity usage into people’s daily routines. Morris & Crawford (1958) found that sedentary jobs, such as driving a London doubledecker bus, are more likely to lead to heart disease for middleaged men than jobs that involve more physical activity.

This paper will analyze relationships between inequitable distributions of physical inactivity rates with the presence of bicyclists and the presence of bicycle infrastructure. Are there more cyclists active in areas of the city that are self-reportedly physically more active? Do census tracts with lower rates of physical inactivity have reduced access to bicycle infrastructure?

These questions will be answered in the context of the City of Buffalo, New York.

METHOD OF ANALYSIS Three types of variables were used in the analysis: physical activity, frequency of bicyclists, and availability of bicycle infrastructure.

These variables were chosen in order to better understand the relationship between bicycling and inequities of physical activity rates across Buffalo. The availability of bicycle infrastructure can be quantified in mileage of infrastructure present for a particular subsection of the city.

Geospatial relationships were analyzed using ArcGIS at the census tract level. The analysis relied on secondary sources of data, as described below. The census tract shapefile was dissolved into four groups based on equal ranges of physical inactivity rates. The bicycle infrastructure shapefile was dissolved into three shapefiles each for the three different types of bicycle infrastructure represented: shared lane markings, bicycle lanes, and off-road paths or multi-use paths. Then these separated bicycle infrastructure shapefiles were clipped, based on each of the four groupings of physical inactivity rates, in order to determine a total measure of the mileage of bicycle infrastructure present for each of the four ranges of physical inactivity rates.

CONTEXT The City of Buffalo has a high percentage of people with limited physical activity compared to all other cities in the State of New York. Thirty-two percent of people answered “no” when asked if they had participated in physical activity compared to, say, 24% in Albany, and 25% in New Rochelle. This physical activity, or

lack thereof, is impacted by residents’ opportunity to engage in bicycling.

As the City of Buffalo begins to take steps towards planning for bicycles, modest improvements have been made to the city’s bicycle infrastructure. The Buffalo Bicycle Master Plan, adopted in 2016, called for the expansion of the city’s bicycle network by 300 miles over the course of the next decade (Olson, Goff, Piper, & Zeftling, 2016). GObike Buffalo, a non-profit bicycle advocacy organization, has made great strides to increase bicycling rates in Buffalo through work with elected officials and planners. Their work also includes increased programming around bicycling (including bicycle group rides and bicycle repair workshops).

Existing bicycle infrastructure is not well-connected as a cohesive system of routes. Many holes in the network exist throughout the city, making it more difficult for an inexperienced rider to navigate the city comfortably on their bicycle. Furthermore, while the Bicycle Master Plan calls for 300 miles of expansion to the city’s bicycle network, the infrastructure that counts as part of this network must be interrogated. As both the Bicycle Master Plan and the previously cited literature explain, more urban bicyclists will feel comfortable riding in a city that has a cohesive network of protected bicycling facilities. In Buffalo, besides multi-use trails that skirt the waterfront and follow the Scajaquada Creek, most cycling infrastructure in Buffalo is not separated from vehicle traffic. One facility that is fully separated from vehicle traffic is the cycle track along William L. Gaiter Parkway from Kensington Avenue to East Delevan. However, this facility is not connected to any other cycling route (a common occurrence in Buffalo’s bicycle network). The remaining on-road bicycling facilities are a mix of dedicated bicycle lanes that lack a physical barrier from vehicle traffic or shared lane markings.

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS Most sites included in the bicycle count within the City of Buffalo were concentrated west of Main Street and south of Delaware Park. In every location included in the bicycle count, there was a higher percentage of male riders versus female riders. For sites counted in the City of Buffalo, the percentage of female riders of total riders observed during the entire count was 27%. For a fuller listing of all data points included in the bicycle count, see the table in the Appendix.

It is difficult to generalize based on the data. The bicycle count data is rather limited in its small scope. More sites would need to be included in order to make this a more robust dataset.

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map of physical inactivity and bicycle infrastructure in Buffalo, NY

Furthermore, the actual sites chosen do not conform to any set geospatial pattern or similarities/hierarchical ordering in traffic volume of road. Many sites included for the count have bicycle infrastructure or might be in desperate need of it. For example, Main Street and Bailey Avenue are in need. While the number of cyclists observed at each site can be compared, it is difficult to know whether a different selection of sites could alter the shape of any perceived curve.

While generalizations and sweeping conclusions are difficult to make based on the data, looking at certain points in isolation provides great insight into how this data may be related to inequities of physical inactivity. The bicycle count on Jefferson Avenue just north of East Ferry observed very low numbers of cyclists (five cyclists on Wednesday and seven on Saturday). This

location is on the border of two census tracts that have among the highest rates of obesity and physical inactivity in the city. There is also no bicycle infrastructure anywhere near this site. Another point to highlight is the bicycle count along Buffalo’s Outer Harbor at Fuhrman Boulevard near Ohio Street. Despite this site being along a long multi-use trail system fully separated from vehicle traffic that connects directly to downtown and via bicycle lane to South Buffalo along Tift Street, only three bicyclists were observed during the Friday count. Meanwhile, the Saturday count observed 39 bicyclists at this location. The off-road trail system that connects downtown with the Outer Harbor does not directly serve population centers in the city besides from downtown Buffalo and is thus more of a recreational trail.

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Grave inequities exist among rates of physical inactivity across the City of Buffalo. The highest rates of physical inactivity are found in census tracts east of Main Street. While not quite as high, census tracts on Buffalo’s extreme West Side closer to the Niagara River, Riverside census tracts and census tracts in Buffalo’s Lower West Side also had higher rates of physical inactivity. Census tracts in South Buffalo (especially between South Park and Cazenovia Park) had lower physical inactivity while Elmwood Village and North Buffalo generally had the lowest rates of physical inactivity.

There are many connectivity gaps in bicycle infrastructure, and much of the existing bicycle infrastructure is the ineffective shared lane markings. Some roads that are included on this map as a route with a shared lane marking are rather treacherous to ride on. For example, Main Street is considered New York State bicycle route 517. However, there are no bicycle lanes on Main Street outside of downtown. The section of Main Street that does have shared lane markings was not included in the bicycle count.

Bicycle infrastructure is somewhat distributed across the different groupings of physical inactivity. The second-lowest range of physical inactivity has the highest mileage of bicycle infrastructure and also the highest mileage of bicycle lanes. This includes many of the South Buffalo bicycle lanes.

DISCUSSION Mileage of bicycle infrastructure did not appear to show a clear pattern of variation moving from census tracts with low levels of physical inactivity to those with high levels.

When examining some of the bicycle infrastructure located in census tracts with high rates of physical inactivity, it is important to consider how user-friendly these facilities are to nearby residents.

For example, the off-road path located in census tract 171 along

12.09.2019: Most of the bicycle count locations are located along the city’s bicycle infrastructure, which is spread between census tracts with varied rates of physical inactivity. Many connectivity gaps exist, particularly in connecting the East Side bicycle lanes with the rest of the city’s network.

Buffalo’s upper west side (a census tract among the highest physical inactivity rates) is rather separated from the surrounding community since it runs along Squaw Island rather than straight through a residential neighborhood like the North Buffalo Rails to Trails in University Heights. Another example is the bicycle lanes along Humboldt Parkway (also in census tracts with high rates of physical inactivity), which are not the most user friendly to bicyclists since they exist next to a highway and alongside highway entrance and exit ramps. So, while there is bicycle infrastructure present in the grouping of highest physical inactivity census tracts, these are not always the most accessible or the most user friendly for bicyclists in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Overall, the mileage of bicycle infrastructure in the city is very low.

With about 76 total miles of bicycle infrastructure, the city is well short of the 300-mile goal laid out in the bicycle master plan.

With a fully expanded bicycle network, Buffalo may see higher rates of bicycling, as was found in other cities (Dill & Carr, 2003; Nelson & Allen, 1997) with expanded bicycle networks.

The percentage of sidewalk riders in the City of Buffalo does not appear to be associated with the average annual traffic count for the road where the bicycle count data point occurred. What is interesting here is that there is no difference between the rates of sidewalk riding on streets with or without bicycle lanes. Parker et al. (2011) had found that more people rode their bicycles on the street after the bicycle lane was installed on St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans. The bicycle count data suggests that at least for the locations and times of observation, bicyclists may not have felt significantly safer using roadways that had bicycle lanes versus roadways without bicycle lanes.

RECOMMENDATIONS The city’s bicycle network should be expanded both geographically and in the quality of facilities. Not only should Allentown, Downtown, and the Elmwood Village have bicycle infrastructure, but these networks should extend to every neighborhood in the city, and they should include separated facilities for cyclists. As discussed in the Buffalo Bicycle Master Plan, protected bicycle facilities should be expanded. At the time of compiling this report, none of the recommended 34 miles of protected bicycle lanes and new paths have been built.

Particular attention should be made to ensuring that new bicycle infrastructure is made available in areas of the city with high levels of physical inactivity.

Bicycle lane facilities that are protected and physically separated from vehicle travel lanes are needed in Buffalo. As shown by the lack of variation in the rates of sidewalk riders between roads with or without bicycle lanes, observed bicyclists did not appear to feel any safer while riding on a road with an unprotected bicycle lane versus roads without any bicycle lane. While increasing rates of bicycling will not solve inequities in physical inactivity, it should be viewed as a piece of the solution. Planning for healthier and more equitable communities involves planning for all types of road users, not just those who use cars.

Transportation planning in Buffalo should focus more heavily on expanding the viability of active means of transport. The physical activity benefits of bicycling as a means of transport should be considered strongly in such planning. While more study is needed to determine the link of physical inactivity rates as it relates to bicycling in the Buffalo context, numerous examples from other cities demonstrate the link (Chapman et al., 2018; Pucher et al., 2010).

Further and more robust study of bicycling rates in the city should be compiled to more thoroughly understand how bicycling and active transportation, in general, may play a role in reducing rates of physical inactivity in Buffalo.

(Excerpts taken from paper, Bicycle infrastructure and prevalence of physical inactivity in Buffalo, NY)

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transitory skin

architectural thesis project spring 2019 80

Kotzambasis’ initial interest in the transitory qualities of the built environment, specifically the temporality of the building skin, stems from experiences working for his father’s construction company.

Working as a roofer and sider for six years, he played a role in the process by which homes shed and accumulate skin layers.

This experience greatly influenced his understanding of the temporary reality of the architectural skin.

Removing and replacing temporary vinyl siding every 20 odd years is considered “best practice,” while building up more than three layers of roofing is against building code. Kotzambasis began to question the way the transitory nature of the building skin is typically addressed.

Current conventions overlook the use of an additive process.

Architecture is typically represented in its most pristine state, drawn, rendered, and photographed to show the brief moment after its construction in which a building has not been marked by its user or environment. The reality of buildings is that they spend most of their lives in a state that is different from their initial renderings. Though a building is thought to be complete after its initial construction,

Students: Faculty:

Elias Kotzambasis Miguel Guitart, Christopher Romano Program: MArch

this is merely the starting point of its longlasting life. Original materials only last as long as the owner and environmental forces allow them to.

Transitory Skin is a participatory built exploration which attempts to understand architecture as the accumulation of layers through the continuum of time and investigate the architect’s role in this process. This phenomenon happens at several scales and timescales, such as accumulation of layers of skin on the body, layers of paint on a wall, layers of shingles on a roof, layers of streets and building foundations in cities, and layers of strata which form the crust of the earth. The focus of the thesis is on the temporal layering process, which takes place in the building’s skin. This process is continually present in buildings, but it is generally concealed and criticized. It is only revealed when the dweller does not have the resources to mask this collected material history.

This project attempts to embrace this phenomenon, approaching architecture as something that is inherently incomplete and imperfect, a continuous process that is perpetuated by a series of agents throughout the continuum of time.

unrolled elevation

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interior photo of mockup

students help build the full-scale mockup

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sketches illustrating the spatial implications of layered materials

The project investigated an intensification of the temporal layering phenomenon as a means of understanding its potentials as an architectural strategy. Rather than being a fixed design proposal, it explores a specific process of building that embraces improvisation and the thoughtful negotiation with existing conditions. Participants involved in the built exploration followed an openended set of instructions and design goals that maintained a degree of ambiguity, allowing for agency in making design decisions in response to existing conditions, available materials and tools, and personal interest. .

The implications of this work exist in the physical manifestation of the built experiment and in the process that informed its construction. The construct demonstrates the ability for the temporal layering process to transform

the aesthetic, spatial, and experiential qualities of a building as it progresses through time. The building skin has the potential to reach an intensity in which it transcends its planar qualities and becomes volumetric. This allows for building components to respond to new functions of occupancy that may not have been present in their original design. The process of construction used in this experiment promotes a thoughtful interaction with the existing conditions of the building skin, which can amplify the potentials latent within the existing skin materials and creates a dialogue between the many agents acting on the building throughout its lifespan.

Collage of student work with Robert M. Hutchins

Selections from Education for Freedom, 1941-1963; as quoted in Dean Harold Cohen’s master plan for the School of Architecture and Planning, 1975

”Since 90 per cent of all scientists and research workers who ever lived are alive today, and since all countries are bent on adapting technology and industrialization, a further acceleration of the rate of change is to be expected everywhere, with a scientific and technical culture ultimately resulting everywhere.” ”It is probable that the most ‘practical’ education will prove to be a theoretical one.

Habituation to routine will be valueless, or even a handicap. What is wanted is the ability to face new situations, to solve new problems; and to adjust to new complications.”

REsponse 12.05.2019

Hope Forgus

Elizabeth Giman Peter Fillion

Joshua Fraass

Kimberly Johnston Omar Khan

Brenna Reilly 86

Beth Tauke

Hope Forgus: Okay, so I think we’re going to just dive right into the broader question of this whole excerpt. How do you see this relationship between a more practical and a theoretical type of education playing out in the school?

Brenna Reilly: I think they drive each other.

Theory drives practice, and I think that that is seen throughout the school. It’s a cycle. I know a lot of the first part of our program, for the three-and-a-half-year students in architecture, is very design-based and theoretical. With planning, we were able to have the practice. We had clients who we were working with and having that background and understanding of what went into that, which helps drive that practical part.

HF: Do you guys see similar things, in terms of the freshmen? When you come in, it’s super theoretical. They give you more of a broader base, and then it goes more into practical education.

Peter Fillion: Well, I definitely was shocked when I first came into the program because I was always good at figuring things out for myself, but they wouldn’t tell us anything in the studio. [laughter] It was really frustrating in the beginning, I told my

friend, I was like, “I just have to eventually accept it, that they’re just not going to tell me anything and I’ll have to figure it out,” and so then once I got to that point and I was like, “Oh wow. Now I can think about all these things in a different way, which is really cool.”

Kimberly Johnston: Yeah, at first, I thought were going to jump right into architecture, but no, the first day we’re drawing Abraham Lincoln under a piece of paper blindly, and I was like, “How does this involve everything?” [laughter] In the end, all this theoretical practice of design all added up. Now I understand space, and I understand how to creatively format, I guess. [chuckle] Beth Tauke: With some sort of logic?

KJ: Yeah.

BT: Particularly, with that curriculum.

BR: How do you see that playing out on the development side of the classes you’ve taken?

Joshua Fraass: So, real estate is way more practical than theoretical.

BR: You don’t say.

JF: Yeah, [laughter] so... I have a bachelor’s in Environmental Design from UB. It was too theoretical — it was not practical enough. You couldn’t figure out how to actually implement things because they didn’t teach us anything about financing whatsoever. So, I felt unprepared to get a job at that point from Environmental Design so. I have a Master’s Degree now in Real Estate, which is completely different, where financing is really the most important part. Design comes secondary in Real Estate, but even still, we’re not learning enough financing. You could just never learn enough about finance. That’s a little bit lacking in Real Estate right now.

It’s important because my background is different. I have Environmental Design, but I also have an undergraduate degree in Art, and I am a practicing artist. I have a lot of theoretical background from undergrad, so that has helped in the practical Master’s part.

KJ: I was talking to a realtor during one of the first weeks of school, and he was saying “Why do architects and engineers revert back to the basics and make simple houses that are just for the financial value.”

And I was like, “It’s because, after a while,

people just think about the finances, and they don’t take the time to think about theoretical design.”

BT: Can I switch the subject a little? I’m interested in this second part of the quote, where he says, “Habituation to routine will be valueless, or even a handicap. What is wanted is the ability to face new situations, to solve new problems; and to adjust to new complications.” I would say I think that’s a false binary, in that developing habits doesn’t mean that one is not willing to change and that one doesn’t know how to adapt and how to change. And so, this is a strong dramatic statement, but I think that I would want to rethink that, so that one of the habits that we form is a way of thinking that would allow us to develop a habit of critical thinking, allowing you to adapt to change and to solve the problems and adjust to complications.

I think it’s something that one develops over time, and so I would call it a kind of a habit, not necessarily repetition without change but a dynamic habit that changes as you get deeper into it.

I really feel that I just have to disagree with the statement. I think habit is very important. Your habits are what you spend your time on, how you develop yourself, what you’re thinking about, and those are not antithetical to change.

Omar Khan: Of course, Hutchins is also talking about citizenship. I think that’s the other thing because, of course, to be a participant, a citizen in a democracy, do we want people to just know how to do things, or do we want people who think for themselves? There is a kind of framework here, of course, technical. This was 1941, so it’s written when, let’s say, scientific knowledge is for the first time happening in universities. I think originally, he was for it, and then he sort of shifted away from that. We’re kind of in an interesting environment because I think what I

hear from most students is, first of all, education isn’t free, it’s expensive. Already the value you’re tying to your education is tied to the expense that you’re putting into it. Let’s say all education was free, you would pursue your habits potentially, but also your desires and your wants. But if you know that every one of your desires is going to cost so much more credit, it changes the formula. You have to think, “Maybe I do have to take those finance courses and not the art courses, because I know that I can go out and work and get a return on that investment.”

“Design is a different kind of knowledge, and it works now much more because you’re projecting to do something . . . It’s very action focused. the knowledge you gain is to act in the world.”

- omar khan

That’s a word we use a lot, unfortunately now in education: a return on investment.

Part of it is, there’s the reflective theory of being able to do something, the other is perhaps a theoretical framework that is no longer around, which is you do something because it enhances your citizenship, your personhood. We’re seeing those are harder to actually fight for. I do think we are in a much more practical school in two professions. You know that at the end of the day, you’re supposed to be able to go out into this profession. They are waiting for you with open arms. I do think the school has tried very hard to bring the practical into the experience. I think

you spoke nicely to that. Planning does it particularly well because there’s a lot of stakeholder engagement.

BR: As do the graduate research groups.

Bringing the stakeholders and bringing the community into the building, but another thing that is relatively new, like with this RED program, bringing Real Estate Development into the building and having integrated studios with architects, with planners. That is a theoretical approach, and I think it’s an important one. We were in a studio this semester, the amount I’ve learned from Joshua, it’s really valuable. I think it’s great to see that side of things because when you’re done with your degree, and you go out into that real world, you’re going to be working right next to it. It’s a practical value of working next to Real Estate Development students, next to planners throughout your college experience.

BT: The thing that I get concerned about when I think about the things that we do here in the school, really could be thought of as great lenses through which to understand the world, and they’re very much related to the liberal arts in general, and I know that the liberal arts, in general, are in trouble, throughout the country in terms of enrolling and population.

We are in a time where the value of the liberal arts, I would say, is very much being questioned, and things will change, meaning some of them may go away.

I think that design in general, can be a way of incorporating the liberal arts into something that may appear to be somewhat on the pragmatic side, but all of these kinds of liberal arts fold into making a better designer, or a better planner and knowing something about them is really important, ultimately, in terms of them understanding their roles in the world. And so, I’m hoping that, as we shift around with the liberal arts and have

87

all these sorts of debates about it, that we think about ways of not losing the whole idea of it but somehow allowing it to reconfigure itself in another way.

OK: It does change sort of their emphasis, though, in that process.

BT: It does, it does.

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OK: Design is a different kind of knowledge, and it works now much more because you’re projecting to do something in the world. It’s very action focused. The knowledge you gain is to act in the world. Where a lot of liberal arts are to reflect on the world, it’s not as action-oriented, and so it becomes harder to monetize in a particular way. I do think that’ll change it. I’m sure the liberal arts would resist also design taking over...

BT: Oh yeah, I know. [laughter] Rather than extinction, I’d like to see some sorts of shifts so, that universities can figure out how to maintain this content in a quality way, how do you maintain these kinds of basics? Which will change, I know that.

How do you maintain them to the point that they are viable in education? That, to me, is a huge issue right now that we’re facing.

OK: There are other forms of knowledge that are now available. I think your generation is incredibly well-informed. I have a 15-year-old son who is incredibly informed, much more than I was at that age. Not that he’s sitting there reading treatises or anything. He’s just snapping things off of wherever. I do think there’s another form of knowledge gain that’s happening. Universities are a little slow, still. I don’t think it falls within these two rubrics of practical or theoretical. I think it’s another thing, and we just have to figure out how we work with it and play with it. I don’t know what the answer there is.

KJ: Yeah, thanks to growing up with the Internet, I can do things very fast-paced.

But when it comes to having things that are long and I have such a short attention span due to growing up in this fast-paced culture.

here. I just hope we continue to go in that direction.

HF: But it’s true with all that you have to, as a school or as an institution, figure out which way to take it. Do you then harness those influencers? I see it as slightly more practical. And do you try and make it then theoretical? I think a lot of architecture students follow that gumball.boy account, and there are memes everywhere. But he also had some really interesting things there too.

Do you then try to harness all those different kinds of things?

BT: Well, this is interesting. A lot of firms are setting up R&D departments or incubators, of some sort. Depending upon the kinds of firms, some of them are saying, “Here are a couple of things. Play around with these and see what you can do.” There is that, but those are few and far between. There aren’t that many out there. There are think tanks. There are, I guess, “do tanks,” if you want to call them that. Maybe it boils down to the value of research. How much do we value research, in all of its forms? And so, that’s a big, giant societal question, really.

BR: Well, kind of like Beth said, you make adaptability a part of your routine and a habit. And I think the school can do that as well.

BT: In terms of our school, exploration for the sake of exploration without necessarily a pragmatic endpoint is something that we have valued to a degree, and I just think that that’s where a lot of the really interesting stuff ends up happening. So, sometimes you don’t know. You might have a question or an idea, and you want to explore it, and you don’t necessarily know what the practical application might be, but it’s a very interesting set of questions, and the arena in which you’re exploring is an interesting arena. Having an environment that values that is to me, probably the most important component of education.

When you’re out in the world, the idea of having to take something and apply it right away to something that has value is part of the formula. Thinking about where can I do this, where can I actually do that longer-term kind of exploration that doesn’t necessarily have an end? That’s

Elizabeth Gilman: Do you think that’s something that could be applied in the field as well as in universities?

OK: I think here, money plays with the game. Everybody knows that that’s the problem. That most firms cannot put into their proposal a certain percentage

08.14.2019: Miguel Guitart, Laura Garófalo-Kahn, and Jelani Lowe discuss terracotta prototypes at the annual Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop.

Students, professors, architects, and facade engineers worked with Boston Valley Terra Cotta and UB's Community of Excellence in SMART Lab. (photo by Douglas Levere)

of man-hours to do that kind of work.

Most clients think that “You went to school, didn’t you? Don’t you know all the answers? Just do it for me.” That’s why you get the cookie-cutter stuff because of people, liability, and all other conditions.

But you do have the rare clients, as well as the rare professionals, that can create a new system.

You have times that we may think that maybe academics could help in that, and I think this school has tried in different kinds of ways to work with the industry, work with practice. Community groups, especially, who really can’t afford design services, act as a space for that. It’s very hard because there are just so many of us and there are just so many problems out there. I think that’s an interesting challenge, whether it should fall to the university to pick that up or whether we really should expect more from the practice to take that on.

HF: Just from people that I have talked to, who have come through these programs, when they hit being in the field in a career, they get bored. They’re kind of upset that they’re draftsmen.

I think valuing, to Beth’s point, that exploration while you can is going to be huge for a lot of people. Do you see the field changing at all for those who practice in it?

OK: I think we’re in for some really radical changes. Clearly, climate change is going to force that change upon us, whether we like it or not, and the built environment.

Whether we’re planners or architects or real estate developers, it has to respond.

We don’t know exactly how to respond.

The response is, we have to create more adaptable architecture, but that’s not where architecture has ever been. It’s not adaptable. It stays. Right? Now, how do you think about that? How do you finance something like that? I can imagine

the liabilities that you have to put onto buildings nowadays.

The other, of course, for me, is artificial intelligence. I do think that is going to change the way we think about ourselves, which is very important, but also the things we will give off, in terms of our privacies, our securities, all of those. That’s another realm where architecture has played a big role. How does architecture transform itself, change itself, to accommodate those things? Is it a resistance to that? Is it an enabler of that? I think this generation is in a wonderful moment. You have really interesting challenges.

The word “sustainability.” It’s not about sustainability, right? Ultimately, it’s not about resistance. It’s about all these other things. Climate change has changed that word. In the late 1990s, sustainability was coming. Lots of departments organized their whole education around it. But it’s not strong enough of a response.

BR: How do you feel about municipalities?

What’s their role in relationships with the architects to make that shift? It seems right now, sometimes architects and designers are used just as a tool or a means to an end for whatever situation the municipality or their client is looking for. “Here’s what we want. Here’s what you get.” I mean, how does that shift? I don’t know, that’s kind of how I perceive it right now. And when you say the shift, is that the shift that you’re referring to? Only a percentage of people who come out are going to become licensed architects. That leads to, “I’m bored. I’m a draftsman, and I’m bored with this.” How do architects, architecture students, or architectural designers take back their own field?

OK: Yeah, I think it’s a really good question.

I don’t have a good answer, but I would sort of say, especially with municipalities, I think they can’t function the same way

they’ve always functioned either. At one point, when the municipal governments had money, they had design arms, they built projects like affordable housing.

BR: Public shifting to private.

OK: It’s very significant. Now it may shift the other way. Sometimes a crisis does bring that out, right? That may give a certain kind of empowerment to what you’re talking about. Now, you’re not doing a cookiecutter project, but you really have to be inventive. You have to think of new things because nobody has written the textbook about the code on that, right? I’m not hoping for a catastrophe. I just think that’s a pressure that would shift certain aspects the other way. At the moment, I don’t feel that it’s bad that architectural students don’t become architects. I think the more people who study architecture and go into other things, the better. It’s a great education. It has a wonderful way of looking at the world. It makes you feel empowered to do things. You look at things as they should be or could be, not as they are.

BT: It’s not passive, it’s active.

OK: Those things, if you then become a writer, or if you become a filmmaker, or you become a real estate mogul, president.

There are those opportunities, and I think that an education like this does open up your mind. This is, I think, how this school has always thought about education. It hasn’t always been so focused. I mean, we came from an environmental design school into an architecture school. At that time, licensure wasn’t important, and architecture wasn’t important. It was all about how am I going to change the built environment. We may be heading a little bit in that direction again.

EG: How are these issues that we’ve just been discussing climate change, the

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shift in the profession, or just the culture of architecture affecting classes? When you guys came into architecture school, were you expecting all of these different issues to be involved in architecture? I know you, Joshua, said you’re not really design-based. How have these topics influenced your education?

KJ: When I first came in, I was exposed to these issues. Thanks to the media we’re all coming into school knowing all of this, we can evolve it through our years here.

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HF: Would you hope for more emphasis on that? Do you think it should be infused more? Do you think it’s there already?

KJ: I feel like it’s there already, but it could be infused more. It’s there because we have the pressure going into a studio environment, being with everyone that has their different point of views on these topics. We’re all learning from each other.

JF: For Real Estate, we don’t really talk about climate change much, because we’re focused on making buildings in Buffalo. There are no major flooding or drought issues that come up. Real estate around here is very stuck in old ways. A lot of the people that control real estate around here are of a particular generation that won’t change and won’t really have to because they’ll be dead by that time. [laughter] BT: Real estate is a huge component of this topic, so how would you take that on in a program like yours? If you were an instructor, what would you do to even bring the subject up, and talk about its relationship to real estate and practice?

JF: My internship in the summer was at PathStone Development Corporation in Rochester, and they’re trying to make a

passive house, a net-zero building that uses no more energy than what it creates. I think that’ll be important.

BR: Do you think it’s reactive? If floods started to occur here, then they would start talking about it.

JF: In some ways, not in all ways because developments that are really successful can be really innovative. I think there’s not as much risk tolerance in practical real estate as there could be, because there are so many financial issues with that.

BT: In your program, how you deal with siting? What’s responsible land management, and what responsible siting might be in terms of what’s planted there?

How are things set up over time? Do you do any of that in your program?

JF: Limited, because Buffalo does have a lot of stormwater management issues.

HF: You see similar things in architecture, though, the code doesn’t change until something disastrous happens. You can see how all of it will just start feeding into each other. We’re going to be forced to change, and all those things might then change our behaviors, and how we educate others, and how we kind of practice within ourselves.

BR: You’re forced to change by money, too, generally speaking.

OK: I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. At other times, there are other reasons you change. We had societies where it was governed by other rules and methods. I think those are important to hold onto and realize that it’s not always going to be money that’s going to govern.

I understand it is, even now, we can monetize every aspect of our life. But we have to figure out as a society, especially if

we want to be adaptive, that there’s never only that kind of one-to-one relation.

At some point, we have to exert other factors because, as a university for a long period of time, are we in the business of anything? I am thinking very consciously about how am I going to help them get the job? Now that formula has shifted because the person who comes into the program has also changed their perception of why they’re here.

BR: Do you feel like that’s turning a theoretical approach into a pragmatic approach by suggesting that almost their happiness or their well-being is a physical outcome?

OK: Are you saying their education yields them something?

BR: Yes, so yielding them an opportunity or a job is one thing, but yielding them happiness is another.

OK: Right, right, absolutely. Is the question, can you bring that to be a value proposition that somebody can say, “Yeah, a job is great, but at the end of the day, I really want to be thinking differently, or I want to be happy, right?”

BR: Yeah, exactly.

OK: “I really want to be super happy.

That’s really what I’m aiming for, and this education will make me super happy.”

Yeah, if we could talk about it that way, I think then we have made huge strides. I think it’s very hard to, understandably, have a straight face and say it sometimes. I was chair before, and I remember sitting with parents who were telling me, “Four years is a lot of time for my kid to be educated.

Can’t he graduate in three and a half?” It’s like, “Well, we have a summer program,” and I was thinking, “Four years is not enough for anybody to graduate. Eight

years, stick around, have fun, enjoy.” And so of course that’s me thinking because I’m an educator. The parents sitting there are like, “How much is this going to cost me?” And we shouldn’t poo-poo that, that’s a reality and that’s something we have to address as a group, as a society.

We have to address that, that’s what makes it hard to say things like, “You’re here because you want to be happy,” it’s a value proposition.

KJ: I was just thinking if the practice, for a second, took a step back from the financial aspect and tried to evolve towards climate change, I feel like that would be beneficial.

You see how fast when the Notre-Dame burned down, how fast people jumped to give up the finances to rebuild it. If we took a step back from money and tried to think of things that would be beneficial towards the changes, people would jump on that to finance it.

EG: Going back to what you were saying, when I think of the different types of students I’ve met, and this balance between practical and theoretical, I feel like a lot of people take what they want from the school. It’s really cool to see how the same education can foster a whole range of different experiences.

BT: When you’re spending time with thesis reviews, and you’re looking at what people are focusing on and how they are taking on these issues and how they’re exploring it, it’s so much more than just getting a job. Maybe there’s that ultimate intention, but along the way, a whole lot else happens. I think thesis reviews are a good indicator of all the great stuff that happens along the way..

09.20.2019: Nicole Little and others from the Architecture and Planning community rallied at the Global Climate Strike in downtown Buffalo. Students made signs from recycled materials and gathered in Niagara Square to help raise awareness to the ongoing global climate crisis.

OK: I think Lizzy what you’re talking about, I think it’s unique about this place, that having taught other places, and visited a lot of other places. There are places that have taken positions, one side, or the

other. We’re going to be very practical.

You’re going to have a co-op education.

I’m not saying they don’t have wonderful students, but there’s no room for what you’re talking about, this kind of outof-the-box thinking because you will absolutely have to get into that box because otherwise, you’re not going to get a co-op. So it’s very hard. I think it is commendable that here you can find faculty that can shift between those two poles and not feel like it’s bad one way or the other.

KJ: Well, I was just thinking, from my experience with my friends in the freshman class, and a lot of them are like, “I’m just trying to graduate and get a job.”

I was going to thesis reviews, and they’re so inspirational. If more of the freshman would just to go to them, to see and be inspired. That would be great.

MODERATORS HOPE FORGUS: MArch Student

ELIZABETH GILMAN: MArch Student, Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow (2019 - 2020), Editor PARTICIPANTS PETER FILLION: BS Arch Student, Freshman JOSHUA FRAASS: MSRED Student

KIMBERLY JOHNSTON: BS Arch Student, Freshman OMAR KHAN: Associate Professor - Department of Architecture BRENNA REILLY: MArch / MUP Student

BETH TAUKE: Associate Professor - Department of Architecture

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board & batten

Students: collaborative graduate studio fall 2019; URP 581 92

Faculty:

Program:

Nicholas Aja, Nicholas Anto, Sarah Donohue, Joshua Fraass, Ryan Hill, Yingjin Huang, Paul Martucci, Joseph Quinn, Brandon Redmond, Brenna Reilly, Siera Rogers, Nirupama Stalin, Sarah Waski Kerry Traynor

MUP, MSRED

The adaptive reuse and rehabilitation of cultural resources involve the collaboration of many different disciplines and professionals, including Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, and Urban Planning. This study brings together these disciplines to look at both the macro and micro of the Richardson Olmsted Campus (ROC). This was done through an analysis of the entire ROC and through an exploration of the historic barn (Barn), and potential future uses.

The Richardson Olmsted Campus is a unique piece of social and architectural history located in Buffalo, NY. The 1973 entry into the National Register of Historic Places secured the site’s preservation and protection. This means that any plans for work on the property must follow the Secretary of Interior guidelines.

Originally known as the Buffalo State Asylum, the buildings were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, using the Kirkbride plan.

The Kirkbride plan, created by Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, utilized light and therapeutic landscaping, and work-therapy to treat the mentally ill.

The Secretary of Interior guidelines dictate the work of rehabilitation projects, ensuring that they do not disrupt the character-defining features of the exterior, interior, or the site. The rehabilitation of the Richardson Olmsted Campus would require developers to integrate these features into their plans to maintain compliance, and ultimately to receive the tax credits that are much needed to fund the project.

An evaluation was conducted to understand the history of the site, which included the evolution of the site over the years

up until the current conditions. A focus was put on the historic defining features created by Kirkbride, Richardson, and Olmsted.

The current condition analysis looked at the interaction with the surrounding neighborhoods and features, such as Richmond Avenue, The Elmwood Village, Chandler Street, Rees Street, and Grant Street. Further, other off-site amenities are explored, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Burchfield-Penny Art Center, Buffalo State College, and more. These off-site amenities are explored in order to provide a full picture of the campus and what can be provided for the proposed users. The site is further analyzed in order to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of current conditions, how the campus itself works for the proposed users, and how the actual Kirkbride Buildings connects to the Barn, which is a structure at the most northern part of the ROC. The current site analysis was used to guide the recommendations for future development on the campus. These recommendations are grounded in building upon current conditions and historical conditions, including the pathways already on campus, the under-utilized green space and parking lot space surrounding the Barn, and the signage and entrance locations to the campus.

The site recommendations include moving the main entrance, reintroducing historic features on the campus in the green space, incorporating way-finding signage for all features, connecting the south lawn to the north lawn and therefore to the Barn, and finally improving the site’s overall connectivity within and to the off-site amenities with enhanced pedestrian/bike paths, roads, and parking.

The Barn reuse was fully evaluated to determine the best use that could accomplish a multitude of goals. These included a use

that would integrate well with the current ROC uses, the adjacent amenities and institutions, the surrounding neighborhood, and the larger region. A market analysis was conducted, and commercial retail use was determined to be the best fit for this 9,000-square-foot space. The tenants would include a bar/ restaurant with an attached tasting room, which will focus on locally sourced craft wine, spirits, and beer so as to pay homage to the past agricultural history of the site. The two adjacent retail spaces will house destination retail stores in order to draw in customers looking for unique items. These will include a home goods store, and a specialty tea, oil and vinegar store. All of the spaces will share a courtyard space.

A financial analysis showed that this rehabilitation of the Barn is highly feasible. Through the use of Historic Tax Credits, along

delapitated structure (photo by Joseph Quinn)

with a federal grant for roof repairs, conventional financing, and minimal developer equity, the project can be fully financed.

The overlapping yet unique disciplines of Urban Planning, Real Estate Development, and Historic Preservation are all wellpositioned to analyze and weigh in on a complex project such as this. The historic reuse and renovation of the Richardson Olmsted Campus draws on the skills of each of these disciplines and, when brought together, have a depth of knowledge that could not be achieved by a single discipline.

The Urban Planning students are well equipped to consider the entirety of the Richardson Olmsted Campus and how it functions.

They also considered the physical interaction, gateways, and connections with the surrounding community and institutions.

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photos of interior explorations of the Richardson Campus (photos by Joseph Quinn)

close up photo of the exterior conditions of the Barn (photo by Joseph Quinn)

The Real Estate Development students considered the widescale impact on the region while more narrowly looking at how the project could be both financially feasible and have a positive impact on the community. They utilized data from market studies to predict the best-proposed use.

The Historic Preservation students looked specifically at the physical structures and improvements to the site, considering how those structures came to be, and what can be done to maintain their history. Their work, while precise in the scope, still must take into account the history of the site and the deep, complex history of the Richardson Olmsted Complex.

The “Big Idea� of this studio is to tap into the deep knowledge of these three disciplines and magnify and leverage that knowledge

photo of the exterior of the Barn (photo by Joseph Quinn)

to create something greater than which could be achieved by one discipline alone. This studio has closely simulated a real-world, large-scale project which would bring together the expertise of many fields and get them all collaborating and thinking communally about how to tackle a project. The historic reuse of these structures does not easily translate to modern uses, and the construction costs are very high. That combination demands creative and innovative solutions that can only be garnered through the collaboration of a team such as this.

(Excerpts taken from student report, Board & Batten: the Legacy of Kirkbride and the Therapeutic Landscape) 95

silence Students:

material culture studio spring 2019; ARC 606 96

Faculty:

Lemma Al-Ghanem, Fab BozzoloFabia, Aubrey Fan, Fatima Mohammed, Unnati Patel, Jonathan Der Yeong Wan, Nicholas Wheeler (Headspace), Craig Brozowski, Elizabeth Gilman, Shane Joyce, Stanicka Mathurin, Abigail Peters, Morgan Smykowski, Ryan Vigiolto (Gradual Stillness) Christopher Romano

Program: MArch

The Material Culture Graduate Research studio investigated the spatial implications of sound as a mode of multisensory architectural research. With the goal of creating a sub-zero decibel level space— an anechoic chamber—the studio began by reflecting on the experience of silence and experimenting with the masking of sound.

the mind from the overwhelming physical experiences of the body in the outside world, one can reach a state of existential awareness. Headspace is composed of three main layers: the inside, the outside, and the in-between.

The wearable devices were meant to limit, eliminate, or direct sound while altering one of the other bodily senses. Shifting the balance of the sensorial experience affects how the body engages with and perceives space.

What would it feel like to experience a space of total silence? How would this fundamentally change the perception of space? The studio research drew attention to hearing capabilities, the spatial dimensions of hearing, the phenomenology of listening, and how people are situated and immersed in the world through sound.

A large cube is suspended above the gallery floor. Its mirrored finish produces a visual echo as the viewer is greeted with the current state of their self and the reflection of their immediate environment.

The cube amplifies the activity around it, mirroring the dissonance, noise, and stimulus of the outside world. The pleated fabric underbelly suggests that there is more to the cube than meets the eye. It is with heightened interest that the viewer pauses to imagine the environment that might be contained within. All incoming light and sound is reflected off of the mirrored surface; nothing can penetrate except the human body.

HEADSPACE

Between the layers, external forces are wiped away.

One enters Headspace to understand the “Self” with a clear mind. By separating

To enter the chamber is to be consumed by it. A threshold tightly lined with thick,

Outside the chamber is where curiosity and preconceptions are formed.

Nicholas: sight

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Abigail: sight, Stanicka: sight, Fab: touch (top, left to right); Morgan: smell, Craig: sight, Fatima: sight (middle, left to right); Unnati: sight, Ryan: touch, Lemma: touch (bottom, left to right)

8’-5”

1.57” steel angle connection to glass frame; fabricated in UB metal shop

2x2 joists spaced 1’ O.C.; sipport hanging members of frame

13/8” steel bracket connected to 2x2 frame; for squaring and support

3/4” plywood supports hanging members for geodesic dome

3/16” x1” stainless steel eyebolt with 31ue**? washer work load limit of 150lbs; connects to 3/4” plywood to suspend geodesic dome

1/4” x 3/4” stainless steel eyebolts with Y4 washer; work load limit of 400lb; connected to 2x2 frame (superstructure)

7’-10”

Exterior space for external reflection

Internal space for internal reflection 1/8” thick mirrored glass panels, measuring 2’x6’; supported by 2x2 frame and helld in place with (24) 90 degree miror clips total weight of glass: 350lbs smooth, hard texture; reflects sound

Domino Connection; fabrication time per triangle - Time spent in water jet - Time spent having holes cut for domino: 1:48s - Time spent in dry assembly: - Time spent in final assembly:

Melamine foam acoustic cones: Dimensions: 18: long (inner/outer cone*) Time spent in fabrication: Time spent in installing: Foam sourced from TMP by way of Germany

Total time spent assembling dome:

3/4” plywood panels; 2 types: eqilateral and icosahedron; combined they create a geodesic sphere, level 1

98 3/16 x 11/4” stainless steel lag bolts connected to hanging hinge supporting geodesic frame

5’-6” 3/4” plywood /hanging hinge at midpoint to brace the dome. acts as a ring beam to counteract hoop stress while holding the dome ome in suspension* verify this with chris* variable spaced air gap for expansion of inner consciousness 1/8” fleece thermal connected to bottom frame for exra acoustic absorption

3/32” cable connect

soft, porous texture; traps sound

variable spaced air gap for expansion of inner consciousness

3’-5”

1/8” layer of knife-pleated 1/8” felt shroud sewng machined layer of knife-pleated felt, hand-stitched at edges with fringes for outer threshold

1/8” layer of knife-pleated F-26 SAE felt in (charcoal grey) [] x 72” ffalo for outer entrance of shroud; 20 yards total, sourced from Buffalo Felt

felt portal: a haptic entry to another world

5"

5 layers of 1/8” felt with 30” diameter cutout for entrance 3/4” plywood diaphragm braced to bottom frame for lateral stability

2’-5”

3/8” x 2 1/2” stainless steel bolt work load limit at 160lbs connected to bottom frame for lateral support 1/8” pleated ‘ramen’ noodles sourced gratis from dumpster at Buffalo Felt

3/32” hot galvanized steel cable connected to concrete floor for lateral support

3/32” aluminum crimp * missing in drawing

3/8” x 4” eyebolt; weight load limit of 160 lbs

Headspace: detailed section

1/4”flat sheet rubber base for extra absorption

0’-0”

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Headspace: exterior photo (top); construction photo (bottom)

Headspace: interior photo

flexible fabric absorbs all external light and sound. This detailed manipulation of folds guides the body inwards to the center, where the body squeezes upwards through a series of soft layers: materials that embrace and accommodate the human form. The waist is compressed by layers of felt; the hands are occupied by the manifold texture of pleats, and the neck is gently restrained by the softness of the fleece shroud. Traversing through the threshold completely occupies the haptic senses of the body, helping to clear the mind of external distraction and direct attention inwards.

Inside the chamber is where one faces existence.

Upon arrival to the inner chamber, one is immediately detached from the outside world. The mind is separated from the body, which is still housed in the soft, restrictive space of the felt. The space the head has now entered, and its sensorial effects, are entirely unexpected. It is as if one has been teleported to a different world. Inside the chamber, it is slightly illuminated and yet completely silent. All preconceived imaginations are forgotten as one attempts to reorient themselves to

the newness of this inner world. Shapes begin to appear in the dimness—long, soft fingers of absorptive foam all point towards center, towards the occupant’s mind. The interior absorbs all sound and creates a feeling of detachment.

The mind is alone, held in absolute silence; the body is lost in space. This disconnect is disturbing at first, but once accepted, mind and body are brought to a state of heightened awareness.

One exits as they came, but with a new experience—a new understanding of self.

GRADUAL STILLNESS The conventional design of the anechoic chamber has found a lot of success in amplifying the sounds of one’s body.

Typical chamber construction has deemed thick, bunker-like spaces that utilize repetitive, soft wedge-like materials, complete with the absence of seams and a brief entrance, as the only method to create such a space. This has translated the anechoic chamber into something unappealing and unaccommodating to humans.

Contrary to utilizing a closed system, Gradual Stillness operates as a living organism, like a diaphragm, where openness and silence coexist.

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The anechoic chamber challenges the user’s determination to reach its central space, where silence and curiosity are maximized. Traveling to the heart of the chamber is similar to a journey through a deep cave, a journey to find solitude.

Various pores subtly begin to trap and block sound from entering the interior space, provoking the user to question: “how many holes does it take to achieve silence?” The pores filter sound in air chambers within the membrane of each perforated wall to gradually impede the passage of sound. The compactness and density of the foam within the ceiling, floor, and chamber walls trap any unconsumed sound that makes it through the first filtration.

05.08.2019: This exploded axonometric illustrates the boxwithin-a-box method of layering used to gradually trap sound and create the desired journey to the center.

As the user meanders further into the depths of the chamber, their sense of touch is induced as they feel and push their way through scattered obstructions.

Fin-like thresholds, referencing stalactites and stalagmites in a cave, intrude upon the space within the passageway, hindering sight and forcing the body to contort in response to their protrusions.

The complete absence of sound lies in the deepest chasm of the chamber, where the abundance of soft material that evokes a similarity to occupying the interior of a sponge. This metaphoric median between cave-like and sponge-like interiors shifts the user’s familiarity with the world, forcing them to inhabit a soft, yet self-responsive and contemplative space.

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Gradual Stillness: diagramatic sketches (top); section (bottom)

resilience hub

Students:

John Lauder

Team:

Brian Carter, Elaine Chow, Kenneth MacKay, Nicholas Rajkovich (coordinator), Bradley Wales

Faculty: junior comprehensive studio spring 2019; ARC 302 102

The junior studio followed the laufmaschine project (see page 128) by designing a Bicycle Institute / Resilience Hub / Community Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The site sits directly adjacent to the Superior Viaduct and the Lake Link bike trail.

Lauder’s Concrete Forest functions as both a community recreation center and an emergency shelter. He explored the relationship between organic and inorganic in his project by combining landscape and material to create a space of refuge for the community and a healthier city. He began by analyzing the presence of plant life on site and its importance to urban areas, especially within the Flats neighborhood of Cleveland. He found that not only was there a severe lack of plant life, but the site was riddled with pollution and poor air quality.

A primary objective of this proposal was to develop a design for a new building for that site which not only provided amenities and a refuge for people but would also “green� the city. The design proposes a tartan grid of concrete tubes that can be used as large plant boxes, able to accommodate a sizable tree. A

Program:

Brian Carter

BS Arch

single tree absorbs almost 50 pounds of CO2 annually, so the introduction of this concrete forest, consisting of almost 70 new trees, has the potential to absorb almost 3,500 pounds of CO2 annually.

By designing the landscape into the architecture, a much-needed tree canopy is returned to the city.

Using the tartan grid as an organizational strategy, Lauder designed a structural system of concrete tubes which are framed by stairs and pathways. This circulation network provides direct connections between Washington Street and the Viaduct while creating outdoor spaces for the community to enjoy.

In addition, the concrete structure provides opportunities to create a range of different sizes of enclosed spaces underneath the concrete forest. These spaces can accommodate an indoor gymnasium, meeting places, storm shelter and post-event shelter, as well as offices, a library, classroom and disaster command center.

Concrete, because of its inherent characteristics related to compressive strength, plasticity, thermal mass and performance as an insulator, is an ideal

axonometric view

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concrete tube modules as seating, planter, ventilation, daylighting

rendering of bike shop

material for the construction of this new resilient community center. The grid of concrete tubes provides significant structural strength and facilitates the use of passive systems that enable the spaces within the Recreation Center to be daylit and naturally ventilated. The concrete tubes, when opened at the top, can direct sunlight into the heart of the building while rooftop monitors, designed to harness natural wind flows across the site, direct fresh air into community facilities and work spaces while inducing natural ventilation through the building. A combination of these different concrete tubes helps to create indoor spaces that are resilient and sustainable, and enable the continued use of the building in the event of power outages, emergencies and extreme weather. .

model photo showing structure and tube integration

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Kahn / campus

3.5 year graduate studio fall 2019; ARC 503 106

Promenade was developed to house the University at Buffalo Special Collections and its various subsets. Situated on the University’s South Campus, the project aims to become a symbol of the institution itself.

Abbey chose a central location along a densely traversed, historic pathway. Given the constraint of the pathway, the northern and southern sides of the site presented two different conditions. The north side creates a ‘formal’ quad bounded by Promenade, Hayes Hall, and a proposed future building. The form of the building was further shaped by placing the entire collection on this side, stacked on four levels.

The south side, which faces Clark Hall, creates a larger quad. A grid of American Elm trees would be planted to increase the aesthetic qualities of the campus and to correspond with the UB Green Initiative. The design was influenced by this decision, with the southern facade stepping backwards with each subsequent level. These terraces are further punctuated by courtyards. Levels 1, 2, and 4 are fitted with intensive green roofs, and the exterior space on Level 3 is occupiable at certain points along

Students: Faculty:

Andrew Abbey Brian Carter

Program: MArch

the southern facade. The introduction of green space works to bring the landscape up onto the building itself.

The program organization helped to dictate the overall form as well. The main private space holds the collection itself. Special Collections divides its holdings into University Archives, Rare Books Collections, History of Medicine, and the Poetry Collection. In order to accommodate the unique temperature conditions of the various archival objects, the collection is split into three bays, each having different temperature zones.

The seam between the collection and the public programming is the promenade itself; a large corridor extending to the south from the main lobby. The lobby space gives lead to a gallery and exhibition space to the north and a cafe to the south. As the promenade rises up to the second floor, it’s interrupted by a series of terraces that feature study spaces and seating areas.

form development diagram

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12.06.2019: This axonometric drawing shows how the terraces, acting as study spaces and outdoor seating, bring green space onto the building as an extension of the landscape.

Northeast Greenway initiative Students:

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graduate planning practicum fall 2019; URP 581

Twelve Master’s of Urban Planning students were part of a studio aimed at developing a vision for a new rail trail.

This one-mile trail, called the Northeast Greenway, would be a much-needed link in Buffalo’s trail network connecting the existing North Buffalo and Tonawanda Rails to Trails with the off-road path that follows William L. Gatier Parkway.

The guiding goals and objectives for this project included harnessing community connections both physically through the design of trailheads and integration with existing transportation infrastructure.

They also sought to promote a healthier neighborhood through active living and also a fully accessible trail for all types of potential users. In addition to promoting environmental health, we see the trail as a source of economic activation.

Planning studios are an opportunity for students to work collaboratively on solutions to real projects through partnerships with the community. This studio worked with Darren Cotton (MUP ‘10) and Stephanie Bucalo from the University District Community Development Association (UDCDA), a non-profit dedicated to community

Rachel Bailey, Priyadharshini Balan, Drew Canfield, Courtney Domst, Grace DeSantis, Jilong Li, Tyler Madell, Violet Perry, Andrew Schaefer, Julia White, Joshua Wilcox, Xieyang Xing Faculty: Ellen Parker Program: MUP

and housing development projects throughout South Campus’ backyard.

Building upon the successes of the North Buffalo Rails to Trails, which was brought to fruition through tireless community activism, the Northeast Greenway will continue the conversion of unused railroad corridors within Buffalo, creating a paved multi-use trail that is both a space for recreation and a travel corridor for bicyclists and pedestrians.

tree planting along the William L. Gaiter cycle track

To be practical, the studio put forth a number of different routing proposals to overcome various challenges along the route. These challenges included crossing Main Street, navigating around a section of the former rail right of way that has been turned into backyards, and a crossing over East Amherst Street. The recommended route for the trail adheres to the route of the former rail right of way, calling for a new pedestrian crosswalk on Main Street and bridge to carry the trail over East Amherst Street. The trail will link together Shoshone, McCarthy, and Kevin Roberson Parks.

All of the students working in the studio had a diverse background and varying interests in planning, helping to create

working on route options in studio

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cross section of multi-use trail

a very well rounded project proposal.

Students specializing in Urban Design helped to create 3-D renderings of intersections and crosswalks in Sketchup.

The Environmental Planning students led the development of innovative stormwater management measures along segments of the trail. Those interested in transportation planning helped the group navigate design standards for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

The community-engaged process will inform the engineering and design of the rail trail. This design can potentially

take aspects of this report, adapted and expanded upon by the communityengagement process, and develop a detailed plan for the Northeast Greenway Initiative. Key engineering elements will include the construction of the multiuse trail and the potential installment of a prefabricated bridge at East Amherst Street.

Once the Northeast Greenway Initiative rail-trail is completed, it will offer a variety of recreational and educational opportunities. Community programming can include public events held on the

right-of-way, community constructed art projects, partnerships with local businesses that offer benefits to employees that utilize the rail trail to commute to work, and partnerships with schools that can utilize the trail through physical education, hiking, science classes on green infrastructure, or ecology walks.

envisioning kensington heights

collaborative graduate studio fall 2019; ARC 607, END 593, URP 581 110

A team of graduate students generated a potential plan for ECMC to develop a 17-acre Kensington Heights site recently added to the existing campus. Twentyseven graduate students lead by three faculty members in Architecture, Real Estate Development, and Urban Planning endeavored to meet the community needs identified in Building Together, a report generated by ECMC and the UB Regional Institute. The primary goals were to incorporate retail, grocery, affordable housing, and recreation, and health to encourage placemaking and community economic development.

The team explored national trends in a changing healthcare environment and were inspired by the hospital’s one-time garden-focused campus. The plan aims to serve patients, ECMC employees, and the neighborhood. Although the studio was originally asked for proposals for the newly added site, through research and design explorations, they identified the potential for a new plan that encompasses the entire campus.

In order to better integrate the new 17acre site with the rest of the campus, the studio proposes re-envisioning the ECMC campus as three interrelated sectors: West

Students:

Faculty: Program:

Nkosi Alleyne, Danielle Anderson, Andrew Battaglia, Jocelyne BelloMartinez, Vincent Bianco, Juliette Brown, Meghan Edwards, Alexander Eisenhauer, Jake Gunning, Lyndsey Hook, Janhavi Jogleker, Christopher Kimmerly, Megan Koury, Nicole Little, Natasha Mendis, Nicholas Miller, Sean Oliver, Matthew Pearson, John Quigley, Gerardo Rivera, Evan Roorand, Brennon Thompson, Louis Tomassi, Alexandrea Volungus, Kristopher Walton, Nina Zesky Hiroaki Hata, Eric Recoon, Ernest Sternberg MArch, MSRED, MUP

Campus, comprising the new Kensington Heights site; Mid-Campus, the area between the new site and the hospital’s main north-south axis; and East Campus, extending from that axis to Grider Street. The goal in signage, streets, and pedestrian walkways, as well as landscape, is to be one campus with three sectors.

Proposals for West Campus: - A Senior Affordable Housing Complex, including an Assisted Living Facility and/or Skilled Nursing Facility.

- A Wellness Center including gyms, therapeutic pools, food pharmacy, and educational and therapeutic activities that confront the social-determinants of illhealth.

- A cooperative Industrial Laundry will provide bulk laundry services to hospitals and other institutions and provide jobs.

Additional Proposals For Mid-Campus: - A Palliative Care Facility - A Transitional Housing facility will provide supervised shelter for post-discharge patients

rendering of the independent living atrium space

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- A Storage Facility to compensate for presently inadequate facilities

- A parking structure

- A Public Health and Administrative Building

- Increased campus activity, the new image, and accessibility should spur public and private investment leading to

Additional Proposals for East Campus:

- Mixed-Use Infill on Grider Street.

- Gardens and Greenways to improve the public presence of the campus and improve circulation.

The key to this campus-wide plan is a grid-patterned street network on the West Campus, with a primary corridor (the Spine) extending from Fillmore Avenue to the Mid-Campus. Upon future demolition and rearrangement of Mid-Campus activities, the Spine could extend to

- A Professional Practice Office Building at the campus northeast corner.

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rendering of the hospice care therapeutic garden

Grider Street. The east-west Spine opens traffic access, creates a desirable eastwest promenade, and sets up a logical arrangement of future development sites.

The studio also proposes a new heart for the campus right at the intersection of the Spine and the East Campus. Easily accessible from any part of the campus, it will be a new quad visible from Grider Street and the Mid Campus. The heart of the campus should be open to diverse campus populations, including senior residents, patients, kids, and families

headed to the Wellness Center, and medical staff.

From the outset, the studio put the highest stress on the need for a grocery and related retail. However, after consulting with industry experts, considering precedents, and studying financial feasibility, they concluded it would most likely meet with success off-campus or on the East Campus with Grider Street access. If a grocery type of use could be made to work, it would likely coexist with the concept of a wellness center and food pharmacy.

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The studio reimagined ECMC as a healthcare campus that will continue to grow in vibrancy and active use, even as patterns of healthcare delivery evolve.

site plan of proposed additions

drawing of assisted living and independent living facilities

Selections from Vision in Motion, 1946; as quoted in Dean Harold Cohen’s master plan for the School of Architecture and Planning, 1975

“Since the industrial revolution our civilization has suffered from a growing discrepancy between ideological potentiality and actual realization.

The metamorphosis of the world through mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication forced man to think in economic terms and organize his business affairs on a global scale. But his life philosophy remained provincial. He absorbed the technological and economic aspects of the industrial revolution with surprising speed but without an understanding of their manifold implications, never realizing their dangerous antibiological and asocial dynamics if accepted without planning. The new technological trends developed rapidly but their social effects soon got out of control.

In spite of exultant forecasts, the prodigious potentialities for healthy living, the fair participation in the benefits of mass produced goods, the persistent hopes to generate harmonious social relationships, have as yet not been fulfilled.

Man has invented pseudofundamentals to camouflage the ancient aliment of economic inequality and squalor. Only very slowly if at all, have the manifold advantages of the amazing technical improvements seeped down to the bottom of the economic pyramid.” ”If architecture is to be an integral part of the biological whole, then the individual’s personal wishes have to be brought into a healthy balance with the requirements of the group. The concept of shelter must be extended to a large-scale social planning including civic and community centers -- as germinating ground for public opinion and a democratic civilization, including the arts. And what a task remains smoothing out the ugly discrepancy between present living and future potentialities and what a task of a planned use of all land!” ”Admittedly this complex world cannot exist without the arduous detail work of the specialist. But the education of the specialist should not start with the training of a single ability before a harmoniously related, all-round education has been completed. This specifically must be the difference between the new and the old specialist. Otherwise flexibility and adaptability will be thwarted. The new specialist will have to integrate his special subject with the social whole. This integration must be based upon a carefully fostered intuitive and reasoning power, the result of emotional and intellectual development in balance.”

response 12.13.2019

Fab Bozzolo-Fabia Katelyn Broat

Nicholas Bruscia Drew Canfield Tyler Madell 116

Hunter Perez

Nicholas Bruscia: Can I talk a little bit about specialists? The well-rounded specialist ensures flexibility and adaptability. I think a lot about flexible thinking and adaptable thinking. I really think if we are too technically oriented, or let’s say we’re too oriented on our criteria that we have to fulfill as an accredited institution, we could lose some of that flexible thinking. Some of the experimental thinking that I think the school is really known for is so critical to me.

I sketched out the timeline starting with the Bauhaus, where a few phases of basic design thinking were formed, the Itten phase around 1920, then the MoholyNagy/Albers phase. And then there’s the Maldonado phase, which links UB to the Ulm School through Huff. I would say the Maldonado phase kind of takes us all the way to now. But I would also add, it might be the first time it will ever be written, that this includes the Huff/Tauke phase.

I think what Nagy was talking about is just what I’ll refer to as “design foundation.”

From an educational perspective, the question of how are you training a wellrounded specialist, or how do you train a well-rounded architect, brings to mind a couple of the key figures—those who have brought basic design thinking to the school. So one of them is William Huff, and the other is Beth Tauke.

And it’s really important to me because this really did guide so much of my first-year studies. I still, to this day, implement a lot of the thinking that went into some of those exercises into the way I introduce more advanced digital modeling techniques.

And that gets into the development of aesthetic judgment, which is the purpose of the discipline, as Huff would say it, and a command over geometry as a starting point. So, with those two things in mind, the argument for basic design is that with an understanding of geometry and a development of aesthetic judgment, one can then start to think flexibly, and confront his or her capacities.

Beth used the word “design foundation.”

That shouldn’t be thought of as only entry-level instruction, or as necessarily preliminary. What they meant is that basic design is fundamental to everything, and it can be applied to more advanced design problems.

[laughter]

So I think the Nagy quote here is actually quite well taken and really timely because I do think that’s something that I’m trying to do is revisit basic design in the school and the history of it here.

There are many interesting design exercises that come, of course, out of Huff’s work, but also Beth’s work. One is called geometric refinement, and the other is geometric construction. Did you guys do those?

Hunter Perez: We did them, but they seemed so abstract. After being introduced to your media class specifically, the process kind of developed. I felt like I learned how to do that throughout the semester, and then when I got to your class, I had a definition of what I was doing, that I could relate it back to.

NB: That is the biggest compliment I’ve ever received. [laughter] Seriously, that actually means a lot to me. But in any case, the refinement is the process of superimposing a grid system over an object and refining it down to the very basic rule set of subdivision until you

can eventually approximate the shape. So that’s a more top-down approach. The construction starts with two points and an arbitrary line, and from that, you’ve got only the capacities of the drawing tools, so the triangle, the square, and so on.

And you have the rules of geometry and your own design-thinking to recreate the object using a sequence of moves. Each new move is dependent on the result of the last. You can’t measure something out and apply it. So it’s not an as-built. The drawing grows and the object emerges in the process. And in the end, what you basically have a geometric scaffold that defines the form of the object. This is a direct precursor, I think, to computational design-thinking. There’s a lot to say about the limitation of tools and, in this case, the harnessing of that. This gets into some really interesting territory. This well-rounded specialist and the history of Huff and Beth, and them being here at the same time in the 90s, has led to a really exciting period in the early 2000s of design experimentation at UB. [laughter] Professor Huff taught the same exercise for decades, and students were asked to continuously repeat the exercise so that by the end of it, new discoveries were made, and an awareness for precision was developed. I think that’s so important because at that level of care and aesthetic quality and just kind of appreciation for detail is something I think will always carry forward. It’s a specialty that carries forward in a flexible way. So one of the approaches is to try to teach technical skills as ways of thinking as opposed to just the tools themselves.

HP: I think that speaks a lot to the undergraduate architectural program, how we reach a broad spectrum of what we learn. Freshman year goes

from learning the basics of design, from drawing all the way to construction.

By teaching that basis around everything, kind of the biological whole, everyone starts to find a specialization with undergrad before they even reach the graduate program, which I find nice at UB since we have those specific areas.

It is a highly general education in the beginning, but then it’s very specific once you do reach the graduate level.

Fab Bozzolo-Fabia: I did my undergrad in the Philippines, and we didn’t have any Bauhaus influence. The undergrad is basically very pragmatic. We designed stairs, that’s it. Then second-year site planning, third-year construction methods. We didn’t have a lot of abstract thinking exercises, and I’m wondering how do you relate those kinds of exercises that you were talking about to a real-world scenario?

Katelyn Broat: As a student here, I came in thinking that I knew what I wanted to do, and then that was wiped from me.

I have no idea what I want to do. That’s something that I enjoy about being here, that I could be happy doing something even though I don’t know what it is yet.

now relate, and it’s not as if you’re going to design a floating building. You know, but you might. But that’s not the pedagogical point. One of the pedagogical points there, of course, to introduce you just to the issue of water. And as an unstable condition, it’s something to be dealt with.

Architecturally, it’s very challenging. The practice of thinking and approaching design issues it means that you’re going to be able to be a lot more adaptive to any kind of real-world scenario.

I also think that this is the real world as well, this educational environment. So this notion of the real world being the field and that education is divorced from that, I think it’s really dangerous to think that way.

“the argument for basic design education is that with an understanding of geometry and a development of aesthetic judgment, one can then start to think flexibly, AND confront his or her capacities.”

HP: I agree with that. Right now, especially at this point after the buoyancy semester, there are so many directions I could take.

- nicholas bruscia

NB: I’m not sure if there’s an educational system that will ever prepare you fully for the kinds of things you’ll be confronted with as an architect, aside from being able to think adaptively and creatively about solutions. That’s what architects do very, very well, and actually trained to do right from the start.

FB: I mean, that’s kind of the disconnect between the two, because all of the employers, all these businesses are looking for just technical skills and not critical thinking skills. How does the educational system respond to that, or do we even respond to that? There’s a beauty of just staying here in school.

You were just saying that you don’t really know what you want to do. I think you do.

I think you have still an idea. You may not currently see how the things you’re doing

[laughter] Drew Canfield: I think for my experience, I’ve been in two studios. One was

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with GBNRTC, which does regional transportation planning, and then the other one was with the UECA, which is a community organization looking to implement a multi-use trail in the area.

With the GBNRTC studio, it focused on smart mobility. It’s very futuristic transportation and what would come along with that in terms of technology, policy, and infrastructure design.

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It was very much pushing the envelope, wanting to see what our ideas are and what is out there. The product was research in this document, just exploring that. Then with the UECA, they’re looking to implement a multi-use trail within the confines of a community organization with budgetary concerns.

I think it’s really important as a planner to understand when you’re allowed to be super flexible and super creative versus when you need to be creative and serve the client well and serve the community well. I also understand the realities of the budget restraints. For our trail project, which Tyler was also in, we created lots of options knowing that they’re a small organization. Our highest costs included a pedestrian bridge. Then we also have other options if they cannot get all of the funding for that right away. There are areas where you can be super experimental and everything, and then there are other times when you need that more practical thinking.

Tyler Madell: This also makes me think of Vanessa Watson, a recent Clarkson Chair.

She was talking about this fantastical vision for Sub-Saharan African cities and what the role of the planners and architects are in this situation where there’s some political force that’s saying, “Alright, I want this super fantastic plan to make me look good.” Then what do we do as planners or architects here? What is our ethical role? I guess maybe do we just go along with it if

we want to keep our job. Do we push back and say, “No, this is not right.”

This kind of made me think of that because I’m pretty sure in 1946, the field of planning as we know it today didn’t really exist. Any planning that was happening in

“It’s about what people want to see in their neighborhood, what challenges they ARE actually dealing with, and how we CAN use architecture, engineering, planning, and policy to make a real difference.”

- Drew Canfield

this era was, I think, Daniel Burnham, who was an architect, who laid out these grand visions, “We’re going to knock down all of these buildings and put through broad avenues.” Really going against what we think of today as the fundamentals of planning. I guess the planner is going to try to come up with the data and articulate the argument to implement a plan based on what the people want to see.

I see here in the excerpt there is something about social planning, something that I think today planners are going to be able to push back on and say, “We’re not supposed to be planning this whole vision without consulting the community first.”

DC: When I read this, I felt like I took a very different perspective than the conversation you guys were having because planners aren’t specialists. We are the adaptive, flexible generalists. These first three paragraphs that are talking about how can

you integrate the work that you’re doing for the most social good, and thinking about equity, that is exactly what the contemporary perspective on planning is that we’re learning about. Planning isn’t about learning some specialty. I’m learning a lot of different things that I can bring together to help be the conduit that brings architecture, and engineering, and environmental science together, and to make it make sense for communities and for neighborhoods.

I think that’s the perspective of planning that best aligns for me as an urban planner, and I see a lot of it in the school as well, which is just participatory planning.

It’s about what people want to see in their neighborhood, what challenges they are actually dealing with, and how we can use architecture, engineering, planning, and policy to make a real difference. It’s definitely a very different perspective, I think than what you guys have been talking about.

NB: Well, it’s a good point because I think the Department of Architecture probably has the same goal. Of course, I don’t think anyone wants to just train the Revit technicians. We’re not training technicians.

We’re not here to do that. We’re here to discuss and try to bring a lot of different things together, understanding that field of architecture has expanded.

I know that a lot of our graduates head into allied fields, a lot of construction management, but also into fabrication, computation, teaching, R&D, and the arts. We’ve had students who’ve worked with animation studios, at Intel, at Zahner Medals, at Boston Valley Terra Cotta. That’s when they start to develop an expertise in these kinds of specialties that just called on them, in a way. An architectural training, and I think a planning training, puts you in a place to do a lot of different kinds of things, should you decide to go, let’s say,

a less typical route. And I think it’s always going to happen. I think that’s just a part of design education.

FB: You’re offered options where you pick up skills -- what is that? Like Jack of all trades, master of none? [chuckle] This quote actually reminded me of, I don’t know, Arcosanti? Like, Paolo Soleri. It’s a planned place that should be harmoniously working together but it didn’t really follow through. There’s this grand vision of how society should work together, of how people in a community should work together, but it didn’t work based on this idea.

off of architecture. I think it was just some aspects of architecture and some aspects of public health are about this idea of urban planning and how people relate socially and spatially.

It all relates to each other. I think what I would say is that I think there’s a lot that planners can learn froMArchitects and that architects can learn from planners. And the same thing with real estate development.

HP: I guess my real curiosity is, being part of planning, how do you guys see the connection with architecture?

One of my biggest critiques of the Planning Department is that I don’t feel like I get a lot of crossover. Some studios who have had crossover, they’re able to have an experience. And I think that this quote, to me, I read it as, “How can we better integrate equity into design and architecture?” I think that that makes sense, and as a planner, how can I better understand the confines of what architects can do in terms of that equity?

DC: I think there is a lot of connection. I don’t know how that necessarily plays out in the curriculum per se, but as professionals, we’re going to work together all the time.

HP: I have a lot of interest in the Planning Department. You said it’s a very young profession in the school? It happened around 1980? Was the development of that major something that budded off because Architecture was just including too many of these aspects? We did see a lot of architects throughout history study both with the city plan and the house plan.

I don’t know anything about design, architecture, or construction—the same thing with real estate development. I really want to learn more about that, but it’s not as well integrated into our planning program. I feel like there’s a little bit of a disconnect there, even though we’re all three in this program. I think we could have some more overlap.

So, I’m just wondering how these quotes speak to the whole of the department, Architecture and Planning, now, I guess.

HP: I agree.

DC: This semester, there was one studio that was Historic Preservation and Real Estate Development. Those two groups were able to learn from each other. Real estate developers are learning what you can and cannot do within the context of a historic building. Then historic preservation students are learning, “Okay, well, these financial incentives are out there. We have this historic building, but how can we incentivize an investor to actually see this building as something that makes sense?” And you kind of need that in order to save the building.

DC: I think planning has been going on for a long time. Let me just put that out there. Planning as a formalized study or degree program? I would say it is newer, but I think it’s because it’s that whole generalist perspective.

A lot of early planning actually roots itself in public health, the initiatives to improve sanitation and public health, and less in the spread of disease and things like that. I think a lot of planning happened because people were out there doing these things that we now consider planning, and it was after the fact saying, “Well, let’s study what other people have done.” It became a discipline. I don’t think it really budded

11.06.2019: Vanessa Watson, the Clarkson Chair in Planning, addresses the dynamics of African urbanism and Global South perspectives on planning theory in her lecture, "African Urban Fantasies: Dreams or Nightmares?" (photo by Yifan He)

In the ECMC studio, it was how can planners work with architects to try to design something that makes sense, given the community engagement that’s

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already gone on in that area. I think a lot of these studios were really rooted in pragmatics and, in reality, both trying to still push limits as far as they can.

creative coding and media robotics. What I learned from that, really, was how to write.

I didn’t learn how to write in architecture school. I learned how to research.

NB: I do think a conversation on crossover is really important to the education of both fields. The dual degree that I took was in media study. I took a lot of film study classes, film theory classes, technical classes on making a film, and courses in

DC: Telling a story is necessary. It's important for planning and architecture.

HP: That’s something that’s still here now.

Students are struggling with doing all this work, and how do we speak about it?

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NB: This reminds me of years ago, for my first one or two study abroad programs, I had students write fiction. So they had to take and draw from the references and then footnote a fiction about something in Japan. Amazing writing came out of that, and I was giving them fictional references too, like, “You should read this novel because your style writing is similar to this.” You know?

I think both fields absolutely benefit from some kind of allied interest. And it may not even be allied. There are many architects who took philosophy and are practicing architects. There are others who took up planning, and there are others that took up product design or typeface design.

DC: I think the biggest thing you learn in planning is how to research, how to figure things out, teach yourself the skills that you need for the project, or problem you’re presented with. How to write about it, speak about it in a way that tells a story, and explains the reasoning and the research behind what you want to do that makes sense to everyone.

I think that is the planning degree. There are employers that want to see technical skills, and I think a lot of students have that push back like, “I want to learn more about design aspects, and I want to learn more about GIS and things like that.”

05.11.2019: Nida Ali's thesis, Plasticity of Identity, addresses how to constitute ideas of the ‘self’ and the 'other' by exploring the relationship between spatiality, gender, and skin tone, challenging notions of materiality of the corporeal body by shifting perception of the body and its identity from surface and form to a sensorial experience. One of the central ideas of this thesis was to explore how material and immaterial environments change perception of identity through spatial performances based on orientation and proprioceptive movements. She constructed spatial systems that change shape to accommodate scenarios of power and control that the body experiences. The hand gently presses against the fabric, blurring the boundaries between object and subject. By virtue of extension and interaction, the body reveals and conceals itself within the hybrid object, an object of sensation rather than of objectification.

I think that while those are really important, in this program especially, you learn how to teach yourself the skills that you need, and because planning work, it’s always something different. That’s why I like it. It’s always a different problem and a different project. That’s the best skill you can get is how to teach yourself those things.

TM: There are so many fields that planners go into. A lot of people become municipal planners, they work for a consulting firm, but there are all kinds of

things that planners could do. Like my dad went through this program, he went for planning also, and he’s not a planner at all… [laughter] KB: I think that maybe that’s the thing about this school, or this type of education, is that it’s set up in a way that you could either have that broad generalized education, where you know lots of things, or you do that, and you develop a specific interest or knowledge in certain areas.

HP: One thing that Chris talked about this semester is creating independent thinkers, and just hearing you guys talk about the planning school, we’re being trained to learn how to adapt, rather than just take what’s already existing, which is nice.

MODERATOR FAB BOZZOLO-FABIA: MArch Student PARTICIPANTS KATELYN BROAT: BS Arch Student, Junior

NICHOLAS BRUSCIA: Assistant Professor Department of Architecture DREW CANFIELD: MUP Student TYLER MADELL: MUP Student

HUNTER PEREZ: BS Arch Student, Junior

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archi tectural alchemy Faculty: TAs: freshman studio spring 2019; ARC 102 122

In the second semester of their freshman year, students designed full-scale, occupiable structures. The projects are modest in size, use, and material, but ambitious in creativity, clarity, and quality.

This studio privileged space-making over shape and form-making. Students were asked to respond to the performance of material systems, building components, and programs and to allow their evolving understanding of the integration of these alchemical elements to create a whole with spatial and experiential qualities greater than the sum of its parts.

The studio began with a game-like approach to the design process. Students were presented with three “card decks,” one a set of building components, the second material systems, the third actions—cards drawn at random produced various combinations that would become the building blocks for the projects. For instance, a student may be asked to create a ceiling system using bent laminated wood to hold fire, and next to design a framed light timber floor to support a seated body.

Students self-organized into 20 teams of 4-5 students. These teams

Program:

Martha Bohm, Stephanie Cramer, Korydon Smith

Nida Ali, Lukas Fetzko, Zach Fields, Thomas Foederer, Michael Gac, Rachael Goff, Thomas Horvath, Elias Kotzambasis, Stanicka Mathurin, and Sara Svisco BS Arch

selected one primary material system and program to create an occupiable installation consisting of multiple building components.

Hands-on exploration and peer learning led to an iterative process of brainstorming, analysis, and discussion.

The scale of study increased progressively throughout the semester, transforming architectural proposals from 1”=1’-0” models, to half-scale prototypes, to fullscale construction.

Projects were tested through drawing for proposed installation at several realworld sites. They were then constructed on campus and displayed in the studio.

Teams were asked to consider project budget, material efficiencies, and to design for disassembly and reassembly.

Each of the 20 teams, through the selection of their “cards” and refinement, developed a unique goal statement. The project at the top, for example, is a wall + stair system using stacked light timber to afford seclusion. Just below is a wall + floor + ceiling system using stacked light timber to support a seated body. There is a wall + floor + ceiling system for affording seclusion and supporting studies.

freshman full scale mockups

interior photo showing space of seclusion

photo of all scale models from across the year

top view photo of interior space

detail photo of joinery

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smart mobility

Students:

graduate planning practicum spring 2019; URP 581/582 124

Mustafa Ardalan, Priyadharshini Balan, Drew Canfield, Grace DeSantis, Mandali Kejjo, Sylvia Kelly, Tyler Madell, Violet Perry, Taylor Reynolds, Andrew Schaefer, Nirupama Stalin, Kristopher Walton, Sydney Zuckerman Faculty: Bumjoon Kang Program: MUP

The Smart Mobility studio’s purpose was to work with community partners to gain real-world planning experience and analyze the transportation challenges faced by urban, suburban, and rural areas in order to inform local planners in the region of smart mobility opportunities. This report details the data analysis, physical design elements, and implementation strategies recommended for smart mobility adoption in the Buffalo-Niagara Region.

OVERVIEW

To address issues related to transportation in the Buffalo-Niagara Region, this studio worked to identify smart mobility solutions.

In line with the Greater Buffalo Niagara Transportation Council’s Moving Forward 2050 Plan, this reference report seeks to provide an overview of the possibilities of smart mobility for a variety of municipalities in the Buffalo-Niagara Region to help solve their most pressing transportation issues.

It was created in response to a slew of issues facing the Greater Buffalo Niagara Region, including a stagnant economy, a lack of transportation connections, vehicle dependence, excessive energy, land consumption, and dilapidated infrastructure (Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council, 2018).

One major challenge facing the region is urban sprawl. The built environment is very spread out, with many smaller suburbs and towns surrounding the city. Many of these suburbs and towns do not have direct connections to the urban core. This leaves many people without access to transportation or ways to travel to other areas of the region. This includes, but is not limited to, elderly people, people living with disabilities, and people who cannot afford cars and rely on the inadequate public transit available. In order to combat these challenges, the GBNRTC outlined regional goals, specific objectives, and regional performance measures that will allow any progress made to be quantifiable.

STUDIO CLIENT: GREATER BUFFALO–NIAGARA REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION COUNCIL The Smart Mobility studio’s client was the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council (GBNRTC). The GBNRTC is the metropolitan planning organization for Erie and Niagara counties that works to identify transportation needs and pushes for comprehensive transportation planning in the Buffalo-Niagara Region. The Smart Mobility studio worked in collaboration with the GBNRTC to research smart mobility technologies and implementations that lead to identifying opportunities for their implementation in the Buffalo-Niagara Region.

Moving Forward 2050 is a plan for smart mobility in Erie and Niagara counties. They cite needing “new, innovative ways of planning, building, and financing [the] transportation system” (Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council, 2018, p 11). The plan outlines ways in which the region can move towards more efficient transportation and systems of smart mobility.

RESEARCH PROCESS 1. The studio met with GBNRTC to better understand the client's goals and objectives.

2. The studio focused on researching domestic and international case studies that exemplified innovative implementations of smart mobility solutions. This process enabled the studio to better understand the various applications, technologies, and designs associated with smart mobility solutions.

3. Research on how shared mobility and MaaS (Mobility as a Service) continues to grow and impact transportation networks in the U.S. and other cities throughout the world.

4. Conducted interviews with local municipalities, NGOs, and private transportation companies to identify issues and challenges that they face in the context of smart mobility implementations.

5. Conducted a mid-review with the GBNRTC to show completed research and identify directions that would lead to a final product that would be beneficial to the client.

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6. Met with NFTA staff to better understand how the local transportation agency perceives how smart mobility impacts the Buffalo-Niagara region and public transportation services.

7. Data Analysis, Design, and Implementation teams crafted design concepts, produced tools for implementing smart mobility solutions, and made recommendations for planners, transportation service providers, and the private sector.

8. Final Review with GBNRTC at their office in Buffalo, NY. DATA ANALYSIS The transit demand index (TDI) combines each individual variable to show where the highest demand for transportation exists. The studio developed maps that show how different census tracts are being served by existing transportation. Each map is a tool to be used by GBNRTC, public transportation organizations, local municipalities, urban planning professionals, and other transportation professionals to inform future planning for smart mobility options in the Buffalo-Niagara Region. The data shown in the maps should be used by organizations alongside their internal data to determine the best locations for mobility hubs or expansion of mobility as a service.

SMART MOBILITY HUB LOCATIONS AND DESIGNS University Station is located on the northern tip of the City of Buffalo. It is considered a starting point or gateway into the City

transit demand index for Erie and Niagara County (2017)

of Buffalo. The intention of selecting this existing structure is to reduce the cost of building a new mobility hub and to eliminate the “endpoint� and, instead, make it a place where multiple transportation systems connect.

The goal of this mobility hub design is to transform NFTAUniversity Station into a destination, rather than a regular transit stop. The transformation occurs by adapting the following placemaking principles: 1. Smart Park and Smart Ride: Instead of vast surface parking, the design has a smart, structured parking connected to the main mobility hub with an enclosed bridge. The structured parking and connecting bridge make the mobility hub easily accessible.

2. Transit Oriented Development (TOD): To make use of the existing infrastructure, the proposal includes a mixed-use building enclosing the structured parking with connections to both levels of the mobility hub and a mixed-use building on the opposite side of the University Station across the main street.

3. Enclosed waiting area at the circle of the bus stops: Currently, bus riders wait for their buses either in the unprotected bus stops or in the main lobby. In order to make the public busing system more efficient and comfortable, the proposal includes an enclosed waiting area that follows the bus loop.

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4. Adding a second floor to the existing building: The existing building is currently not supported by any facility that makes the experience of using the public transportation system a desired destination.

5. Bus layover zone connected to the main building: The design proposes a place where the drivers can take a break and park their buses safely and connecting in with the main building.

6. Autonomous supporting surfaces / electric car parking with charging docks: Electric and autonomous vehicles are becoming

University Station as a smart mobility hub

more popular; therefore, a parking lot has been dedicated for these types of vehicles at grade level for easy accessibility.

7. Prioritizing unprotected public space users such as pedestrians and bicyclists in the design: The mobility hub provides several locations for bike racks and interconnected bike paths with the adjacent bike network.

8. Redesign street section to put pedestrian, public transportation user, and bicyclists first: The street cross section has been revised to reduce the pavement area and to increase the connectivity across the main street. In addition, the street edge has been revised to accommodate the installation of new technologies such as wayfinding, smart bus stops, bike racks, smart lighting system, and flexible zone. In the concept design below, the above mentioned principles that combine placemaking principles and intelligent technologies that solve the existing challenges and help transform the existing station into a smart mobility hub.

SMART MOBILITY HUB AND SMART CORRIDOR The intersection of Bailey Avenue and Kensington Avenue is the spine of East Buffalo and an important transportation node

Bailey and Kensington intersection as the site for a smart corridor

that usually is congested during the rush hours on account of poor infrastructure and lack of development. With some implementation, it could be an important destination that could attract businesses and encourage the economic development of the East Side of Buffalo. This intersection is very active on account of the number of cars and buses that are using this intersection to reach different destinations. It located in an area with many active facilities, like the University at Buffalo, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Sisters of Charity Hospital. Also, this intersection is located less than half a mile from Kensington Expressway, which connects the Downtown area with the Airport.

Foundational elements of the Smart Mobility Hub and Smart Corridor are implemented and incorporated into the design to create a development that could present potential opportunities to solve current issues in urban areas.

The design for Bailey Avenue includes a Smart Mobility Hub building that includes decent waiting areas, Wi-Fi free connection, ATMs, travel kiosk, ITS and Smart Technology learning center, library, cafĂŠ shop, indoor market, a wellness facility, and other recreational facilities. Also, some sustainable techniques will be included in this building to increase energy efficiency by using solar panels and intelligent energy controls. This building also has an outdoor public space with landscape and seating areas where people can sit and enjoy while they are waiting.

The studio envisions Bailey Avenue as a walkable and pedestrianfriendly Smart Corridor with a safer transportation system and less traffic congestion by redesigning the corridor to have bus stop area, shared lanes between cars and buses, bike lanes, a flexible parking zone and curbside, electric charging zones, a pedestrian lane, and green space. Also, this corridor has space for bike racks, a bike share program, a travel kiosk, red light cameras, and electronic speed signs. This Smart Corridor will create a Transit Oriented Development with mixed-use buildings on both sides of the corridor, providing space for retail, business offices, and a potential location for affordable housing units.

CONCLUSION Smart Mobility, in whatever form it took, serves cities best when it meets the existing community needs. During the process of creating this report, community engagement emerged as a key component of success in Smart Mobility implementation. Cities that invested in new technologies, simply for the sake of having what they saw as the newest innovation, often saw a poor return on those investments and little or no improvement in the overall

Bailey and Kensington intersection: proximity to active facilities

function of their city transit systems. Cities that had community engagement and involved the public, not only in identifying those needs, but finding and implementing the solutions as well had better outcomes by far. Additionally, planners much be aware of issues of equity when selecting Smart Mobility solutions. Technology is not an end unto itself; it is a tool, and new technologies that are implemented without consideration for existing economic or social challenges may exacerbate those challenges. If cities are not aware of or ready to address existing equity issues, they will not be able to implement effective Smart Mobility solutions. The studio hopes that this report can assist municipalities from villages to urban centers in moving towards a more equitable transportation future.

(Excerpts taken from student report, Smart Mobility - A Framework for Local Governments in the Buffalo-Niagara Region)

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lauf maschine

junior comprehensive studio spring 2019; ARC 302 128

In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted and spread ash into the atmosphere, causing the average temperature around the globe to drop by 3°C. As crops failed around the world, horses and oxen were slaughtered because they couldn’t be fed. This left few means of transportation except by foot.

Several historians argue that this event led to the invention of the laufmaschine.

This two-wheeled, wooden vehicle was designed and built by German inventor Karl Drais in 1817. It was called the laufmaschine, which is German for “running machine” because it was propelled by running.

The laufmaschine was the first widely available vehicle that was not animalpowered, was a response to climate change, and intrigued many people with the possibility of moving about on a personal, mechanized vehicle. With this in mind, the junior studio began their semester by, in teams of 4 to 6 students, developing their own laufmaschines and researching issues of personal transportation, climate resilience, and construction techniques. It also served as an initial investigation toward the design

Faculty: Program:

Brian Carter, Elaine Chow, Kenneth MacKay, Nicholas Rajkovich (coordinator), Bradley Wales BS Arch

of a Bicycle Institute / Resilience Hub / Community Center for Cleveland.

The laufmaschines had to employ a frame logic, be stable and steerable, and have at least two wheels making contact with the ground. Designed for a single rider, the laufmaschines couldn’t be propelled by anything other than the operator’s own body; meaning no pedals, chains, other mechanisms, or help from teammates were allowed.

The design and construction process culminated with a relay-style race along the Lake Link Bike Trail near the Superior Viaduct in Cleveland, Ohio.

Through design, students had to consider assembly and disassembly, ergonomics, structure, construction, and sustainability.

Due to the necessity to travel to Cleveland for the relay event, students had to design their laufmaschines with transportation and reassembly in mind. Secretariat allowed for the wheel assemblies to be easily unfastened, taken off, and then reattached after transport.

Similarly, FlexFrame utilized bolt and nut connections to allow for easy disassembly Chariot: Jack Heiser racing along the Cleveland Lakelink bike trail

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and assembly, laufmaschine.

creating

a

portable

Impulse flexes under the user’s body to decrease the weight placed on the legs. The structure, made through bent glue laminated oak strips, capitalizes on compression forces and increases stability when loaded with the weight of the user.

The design allows the rider to engage in a full range of motion for each stride, maximizing the efficiency of every body movement.

Some groups also experimented with different structural framing techniques.

Chariot is structured with a unique truss system comprised of bent steel rods welded to plasma cut, rectangular stirrups.

Diagonal rods added as further bracing for the frame.

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Ideas concerning sustainability were generally seen throughout the studio, but some groups allowed themes of environment and waste to drive their designs. FUSE Cycle was constructed by utilizing and recycling neglected parts from old, used bicycles. BIKEA focused on efficiency of construction. It was constructed out of a single sheet of plywood, using every piece of material and leaving no waste behind.

FUSE Cycle: Louie Miscioscia racing in Cleveland (top); Chariot: Bradley Wales helping his team with fabrication (bottom)

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Shibui, Chariot, Gazelle (top, left to right); Moment, BIKEA, FUSE Cycle (middle, left to right); Impulse, Flex Frame, Zamboni (bottom, left to right)

pulp

Students:

material culture studio fall 2019; ARC 605 132

The Material Culture Graduate Research studio began by researching typologies of decay and monocoque structures, or structural skins. Driven by a desire for temporal conditions, the studio explored materials with degrative qualities, such as paper. They also looked into the effect that form and material has on structural capacity.

KRAFTING The Krafting team, inspired by Frei Otto’s method of study and model making, studied tensile properties and forms through stretched fabric and nylon string.

Through a series of explorations, they were able to test and catalogue different curvatures and construction techniques, such as creating forms through tensioned fabric and then spraying the paper pulp across the surface.

The intention was to remove the fabric formwork once the pulp had hardened and dried. However, as a part of the making process, failure revealed issues of materiality and formwork. The paper pulp wasn’t adhering to the polyester fabric used as the formwork, which was flexing

Faculty:

Fab Bozzolo-Fabia, Richard Runfola, Jarrett Trudeau, Ryan Vigiolto, Nicholas Wheeler (Krafting), Craig Brozowski, Michael Hoover, Morgan Mansfield, Abigail Peters (Structural Paper Shells) Georg Rafailidis

Program: MArch

and changing shape under the weight of the wet pulp.

In response, the formwork design was modified to use panelized, organic fabric, burlap, that was sewn together and put in tension through chords tightened against the studio’s interior surfaces. The fabric surface consisted of 100 burlap panels. The pulp mixture was applied to both sides of the burlap, embedding the formwork and making it part of the system as structural reinforcement.

The team used shredded Kraft paper and printer paper as the main ingredient to their pulp mixture.

This design focused mainly on structural exploration with the intention to maximize the size to the extents achievable within the Parker Hall studio. The design of the space responded to the existing conditions of light and movement within the studio. The openings aligned with the studio’s entrance and window, allowing for a flow of people and light through the structure. One of the opening framed the pin-up space so that their final review could take place from within and around the structure without impeding on the presentation.

Krafting: construction and fabrication techniques

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Krafting: interior photo of mockup (photo by Georg Rafailidis)

ERS

tter spray ulp over

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Damn it, clogged again.

Five Gallon Bucket: Two sprays down, twelve more to go.

No rivers yet.

The single most useful tool for the pulp studio. + Carry water + Carry pulp + Mix pulp inside Cost: $5 x (3) buckets

DehumidiďŹ er:

20 - 40% humidity while drying

Helpful to reduce moisture in studio environment and decrease dry time of pulp. + Displays humidy percentage + Can reuse collected water for pulp mixture - Uses a lot of electricity - Can dry out air too much Cost: Free! (borrowed)

12.04.2019: The Structural Paper Shells team created large, detailed process drawings to show the development and construction of the paper shells.

After being removed from Parker Hall, Krafting is looking for a new home outside. While a specific place hasn’t been determined yet, the team would like to place the structure in a park or forest to put the notions of decay and temporality into action.

STRUCTURAL PAPER SHELLS The Structural Paper Shells team was inspired by the modeling techniques of Antoni Gaudi, Heinz Isler, and Frei Otto, generally involving inverted forms created through hanging chains or fabric. These forms, developed through self-weighted tension, are flipped 180° and then work in pure compression.

The team began their exploration by testing different additives in their pulp mixture, which used cellulose insulation as its main component. After experimenting

with multiple additives, they found that flour considerably increased the strength of the insulation mixture. They continually improved their production techniques as well, advancing from easily broken blenders to a power drill mixer.

Cotton muslin fabric was hung from curved, wooden frame pieces that were attached to the ceiling. This would act as the formwork for the different shells that were created. Each of the eight shells required its own unique formwork.

The team documented using 150 pounds of cellulose insulation, 124 pounds of flour, and 660 gallons of water to produce eight catenary paper shells.

Once dry, the shells were taken down from the ceiling and the fabric was carefully peeled away. The shells, selfsupported through compression, were set up next to each other to create a linear, vaulted space. After their review in the fall, the team moved the shells to Artpark in Lewiston, NY.

Similarly to the Krafting team, the Structural Paper Shells team used a power sprayer to coat the fabric form with their pulp mixture. It generally took 11 to 15 passes to achieve the desired thickness across the shell. Two to three layers of hand-applied pulp were added along the ridges to increase their strength. The room had to be conditioned to be between 60% and 80% humidity while spraying.

Photogrammetry: Useful to capture the folds and ripples of the full scale models.

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Yeah, you’re gonna want to come see this.

They’re hanging fabric and wood from the ceiling and spraying paper on the walls.

This is the worst fire hazard I have ever seen...

- 80-100 photos produce best result - Important to get the top of the models!

-Takes a lot of editing in Recap

How many more shells are left to make?

Another day, another shell...

re going to back in the flip it over!

Hold on guys, go slower!!

Duct Tape: Useful for just about everything, including: - taping up plastic sheeting - taping down footings before straps are attached

So you’re saying this stuff is fireproof?

Well... fire resistant at least I think.

It takes a team of 7-8 people to move a single shell. Thank you to everyone who helped: Derek | John | Connor | Ricky | Xing | Nick Haley | Jarrett | Fab | Stanicka | Randy Charlie | Lukas | Russ | Mike | Ryan | Lindsay

Stop-motion videos capture the process.

(23) hours of video (1,437) photos

Once the shell is in its upright position, the weight support itself. Any small cracks self-repair through compression.

-

12.04.2019: The shells became self-supporting after they were flipped into an upright position, switching from being in tension to being under compression.

Form follows fantasy Students:

european study abroad program summer 2019 136

There may be no better display of an architecture inspired by fantasy than the grand residential projects of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–1886): the Schloss Herrenchiemsee, a one-to-one replica of the central portion of the Palace of Versailles, including an even more elaborate Hall of Mirrors; the more modest Schloss Linderhof, a neo-baroque remodel of a royal Bavarian forester’s house, complete with a vast garden and surreal “Venus Grotto;” and the infamous Schloss Neuschwanstein, an enormous pleasure castle perched high at the edge of the Bavarian Alps—giving real-life animation to the image of fairy tales.

Faculty:

Program:

Emily Battaglia, Garthe Burke, Thomas Cleary (Hall of Rhythmic Performance, Antechamber of Candid Gild), Hadi Al-Jabi-Lopez, Fatima Mohammed, Christopher Welch (Antechamber of Constructed Poche) Gregory Delaney BS Arch, MArch

By the mid-1880s, the palace’s main sequence of rooms was largely completed. But construction overruns in 1885 and Ludwig’s untimely—and mysterious—death left much of the palace’s interior unfinished. A vast number of its rooms, left unbuilt and undesigned, remain a hollow shell of unfulfilled fantasy.

Of the three, the Schloss Herrenchiemsee offers the most over-the-top celebration of Ludwig II’s obsession with the Ancien Régime of France. The palace boasts a flamboyant interior utterly divorced from function.

For this studio, students picked up where the architect, Georg von Dollmann, and Ludwig, left off: to propose a 21stcentury vision for the completion of the palace’s north and south wings. Tied to the Grand Tour Redux: Europe 2019 study abroad program, the studio drew on experiences of – and conversations of – the architecture of the Baroque, Rococo, and their 19th-century neo-revivals; the architecture of national and personal identity; and contemporary architecture’s ability to speak to history and reveal its untold stories.

The palace was built to be occupied solely by the King himself and his invisible staff. Instead, it’s an architecture born of symbolism and analogy, fueled by selfseclusion and embattled delusion: an extravagant homage to Ludwig’s hero in history, King Louis XIV.

The program took 31 undergraduate and graduate students across Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, traveling over 4,500 miles and visiting, admiring, and discussing more than 40 cities and towns and over 300 buildings.

HALL OF RHYTHMIC PERFORMANCE Director Luchino Visconti's 1972 film, Ludwig, depicted an interesting obsession of the self proclaimed "Moon King."

Ludwig II was infatuated with the theater.

Between 1872 and 1885, the Bavarian King had 209 private performances given for himself alone. For him, theater embodied the creation of a fictional, magical world on stage. As the often isolated King complained, “I can get no sense of illusion in the theatre so long as people keep staring at me…I want to look myself, not to be a spectacle for the masses.”

The Hall of Rhythmic Performance encloses an open floor plan, free for visitors to circulate. It is the undulating acoustic panel ceiling that becomes the protagonist of the space.

Colored in a Rococo styled pastel palette, the panels extend from the ceiling to create a theatrical, three-dimensional marbling effect throughout the room.

The hall uses the panels to delineate various spaces within the room, creating whimsical scenes for socializing through play and performance.

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Hall of Rhythmic Performance: wormseye view axonametric (top-left); Antechamber of Candid Gild: wormseye view axonametric (bottom-right)

A single gilded piano inhabits the space, symbolizing Ludwig’s passionate admiration for art, music, and the German composer and theater director, Richard Wagner. The room embodies Ludwig’s desire to escape from reality and have an immersive, private performance.

ANTECHAMBER OF CANDID GILD The Antechamber of Candid Gild takes on an important feature of the Neo-Baroque style of Ludwig II’s palace, Herrenchiemsee—faux marble.

Marbleizing or faux marbling is the preparation and finishing of a surface to imitate the appearance of polished marble. During the Late Baroque period, the techniques were perfected and have been used in all styles of construction well into the 20th century. The elegance and refinement of the techniques often deluded visitors from distinguishing between false and real marble in many churches, palaces, and public buildings in Europe.

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A wide range of marble within a building displayed the owner’s power and wealth because it meant they had the economic capacity to travel and source marble from around the world. Marbleizing techniques came in high demand when those without the means to travel sought to portray the same sense of wealth. The technique became so desirable and refined that faux marble became more expensive than actual marble.

For the antechamber, an exaggerated sense of marbleizing is displayed within the room to emphasize the obsession of that period.

Antechamber of Constructed Poche: interior model photo

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Hall of Rhythmic Performance: interior model photo

Antechamber of Candid Gild: interior model photo (right)

CONSTRUCTED

takingon the visual metaphor of two swans kissing.

Perhaps one of the most integral elements of Baroque and Rococo architecture is the art of poche. Architects in that period used complex interpolations of plan and section to create unique spatial conditions.

The antechamber also acts antithetically to the material and experiential concept of poche. The exposed frame generates a spatial condition but permits you to see the tectonics of the frame and the surrounding masonry. Although the poche travels over the windows, the gaps between the frames bring transparency and lightness to the space, allowing both natural and artificial light to filter in.

ANTECHAMBER POCHE

OF

This antechamber serves as an analysis of Baroque poche, furthering the legacy of shaped spaces while being designed with contemporary concepts in mind.

The geometry of the antechamber takes a position of both agreement and exacerbation of the Baroque and Rococo.

The space is embodied by an array of wooden frames intending to emulate barrel vault construction. The sectional form of the space seeks to further the flamboyance of the Rococo period,

Collage of student work with Louis Sullivan

Selections from writings collected from 1895-1918; as quoted in Dean Harold Cohen’s master plan for the School of Architecture and Planning, 1975

”Anyone who will take the trouble to investigate the architectural schools will shortly discover that, as institutions of learning, so-called, they are bankrupt, if, by solvency we assume what makes for the good of the people. Not only are they useless to our democratic aspirations, they are actively pernicious, and their theory of operation is a fraud on the commonwealth which supports them. Their teachings are one long continuous imbecility. They are undemocratic to the core of their dried-up medievalism, although a democracy pays their bills and houses and feeds them in a land of freedom.

They are essentially parasitic -- sucking the juices of healthy tissues and breeding more parasites.” ”Not only have the architectural schools failed to keep pace with the general progress of educational philosophy and the teaching art, they have, as it were, flouted such progress.

Unfamiliar with the immense educational value of metaphysics and psychology as the groundwork of the teaching art, they lack the ground-plan of a naturalistic philosophy of architecture in its historical and creative aspects; hence they fail utterly to illuminate the architectural art past, present, and prospective.”

RESPONSE 12.11.2019

Michael Gac

Charles Davis II Aubrey Fan

Mustafa Faruki 142

Hadas Steiner

Michael Gac: One of the things about this quote that sticks out to me is that towards the end, Sullivan starts talking about the naturalistic philosophies of architecture, and it seems to kind of resonate through his time in Europe and in Otto Wagner’s introduction through building being derived from form and function—and hopefully not misquoting this—but from Wagner, “Art and artists had a duty and obligation to represent their period.” And the naturalistic tendencies around this time to branch away from the classical technologies of that time. So as a school today, are we still representing the time period now, and how has this manifested itself through our educational process?

Charles Davis II: So when he discusses a naturalistic philosophy of architecture, he’s very influenced by people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman— the kind of naturalists in the American pantheon. And he’s trying to take this idea of naturalism as culture bubbling up organically from its source and create an architectural aesthetic that matches the new American context. So part and parcel of what he’s rejecting here is the function of precedent in the École des BeauxArts system and the European revivalism

that he feels is medieval or feudal and its bringing an old world system and overlaying it on to a new world system. So this new world system, he believes, is fully democratic, and there’s local culture there, but there isn’t an avant-garde architecture to express what that’s like, and that’s what he was meaning by a naturalistic philosophy.

Hadas Steiner: I feel like there’s been this return of organicism in the language of nature, into architecture in the post-digital era and where some of this comes from.

If we’re asking about the current moment, I think that what Sullivan was calling for then, is still really unrealized in the architectural profession today, and there’s still theoretical work that’s being done to bring it to bear on architectural education.

This school is still very modernist in my view.

provocative text. At one point he does say that, “When architecture schools should be creating youth, instead they’re creating the old. When they should be creating beauty, they’re instead creating fashion, fashion mongers. When they should be creating common sense, they’re instead creating insanity.” And so in thinking about it in that way, those are the things that he thinks an architecture school should be doing or what they should be producing.

HS: He’s looking at this as the moment when architecture schools are taking a position, and the Beaux-Arts is still the dominant way of teaching.

Mustafa Faruki: I think there’s a lot of differences from what’s happening here, in terms of studio and definitely the role of precedents. That idea of what a precedent is and looking at it and using it, copying it, things like that.

Wagner is an appropriate example because Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were interested in what Wagner was saying at this critical moment saying, “No, the past is not what we want to draw on.

What we’re going to do now is create an architecture of the modern moment.”

So it’s this crisis… and I think that this crisis—if you want to make it about now— is one we live with, because we’re in a period of transition, too.

The first part of the quote is from “Kindergarten Chats,” and it’s a very

Aubrey Fan: I don’t know so much about Sullivan, and the history and his

grounding, but I was shocked actually by how bombastic he was. But he is calling something out that I think is a problem in education in general—especially higher education—which is this idea of democracy. It's something that I was really thinking about within the school... what takes precedent? I came from an educational background where I learned pedagogical theory and how to work within the classrooms and how to teach a wide rand of individuals. And I think that in the university, there’s kind of a pull between, are we here to educate, are we here to inspire, or we have to get funding.

We have to find backers and supporters for our research, and then it becomes very research driven.

But when he’s talking about democratic aspirations, I’m thinking, “Does the school operate as a democracy? Are there equal opportunities within it? Are students allowed to pursue those different venues, or is there kind of like the Beaux-Arts, top down, we want to rank you, we want to see a certain set of standards met? And is there a conformity and hegemony that’s produced through the university?” And I think that’s not just within architecture at this point. The thing I disagreed with him about was that they’re actively pernicious. I don’t think that the school intends to stifle.

HS: Well, that’s an interesting point because you’re talking about architecture schools that are already absorbed into a university system, whereas Sullivan was looking at that as a new phenomenon.

MIT being the example because the Beaux-Arts is like an art school, it wasn't part of a university, so I like this thought that you're having.

CD: The Beaux-Arts, it was an official wing of the state. It was created to develop a state national style, and within that context, it's true that it didn't operate like MIT or Harvard or the other professional

schools in the US, but it was a part of its imperialist regime. It established and focused students' attentions on the most elite forms of cultural production.

HS: Before the revolution, it was a very dogmatic art school that was producing architecture for royalty and aristocrats, basically.

CD: I would say that, at least for me, my critique of the Beaux-Arts is that embedded within its idea of precedent was a way to legitimize the supremacy of the state within Western Europe and that this is a value that I think gets abstracted away when we look at the idea of precedent, where it comes from, why it was important within architectural education. And so Sullivan is interested in precedent but not their precedent. He’s interested in precedents that he believes are local, contemporary, coming from the soil, sort of giving birth to itself in local conditions.

But to me, he’s still doing something similar, which is that he’s trying to figure out where the precedents are that will legitimize a new architectural form.

HS: What is American about American architecture as opposed to what is European about American architecture?

And what this means for American architecture schools in general—how does one create a pedagogy that breaks with the tradition of looking always backwards, I think, and maybe that’s what this call is.

And you were saying that you feel like there’s very strong emphasis here still on precedent.

MF: Definitely, we just had a studio based on the Dom-Ino House, which I think 80% or 90% of the students in my studio kind of misunderstood: what it was, whether or not it existed, and what that perspective drawing of it actually means. Maybe

because of some of the things that you’re talking about in terms of requirements, accreditation, etc. Again, we’re thinking about the state and what we are required to do, and combining it with these precedents. I find it interesting, how history is this thing that can be deployed— can be manipulated—but somehow but has to be handled.

I just find it fascinating in the culture of studio how we’re trying to grapple with history still: either by looking away from it, confronting it, or having a position towards it.

“history is this thing that can be deployed— can be manipulated— but somehow has to be handled . . . we’re trying to grapple with history still: either by looking away from it, confronting it, or having a position towards it.”

- Mustafa Faruki

CD: In terms of UB as an institution, I think of its origins, and I think of people like Reyner Banham and Magda McHale.

These are folks who are sort of critiquing modernism in a particular way. The Environmental Design program was created as a kind of alternative to the traditional modernist practice. The roots of the school are very modernist. And I would say that still are modernist, yes. And I would say that it’s still very strong in the studio culture, even though we’ve sort of adopted other trajectories, which I find interesting. So, when you have a modernist pedagogy, or at least one that is interested

143

in being in dialogue with modernism, and then you bring something like Situated Technologies, which is a new form of architectural organicism, but it’s based on a very different scientific basis.

144

What’s interesting for me about our Situated Technologies Graduate Research Group is that I find it to be less dogmatic, in terms of what kinds of discourses students and faculty want to use versus others. Early on, there were lots of programs, and there was a real effort to carve out a niche in terms of what critical discourses you wanted to have and attach to them—there was a way that they were using contemporary biology to legitimize the work that they were doing.

A lot of the essentialist rhetoric that came from the 19th century—which was part in such biology, and now part of this contemporary, emergent, morphological kind of discourse—there’s an overlay there.

There’s a new set of techniques, but there’s an old set of rhetorics. And so there’s a tendency to repeat these old systems and I think this happens every time architects go back to nature or science to legitimize their work. Progressively, I’m getting to the point where I think that architects don’t necessarily produce knowledge. What they do is produce experience—an artistic experience that’s related to the present moment.

But then when they're called upon to legitimize why they made those forms—or why are they using those processes—I think some folks tend to hold on to the scientific language as a kind of legitimation.

Architects kind of read everything without really understanding anything. So in that sense it’s great because it allows for inspiration, but it repeats some of the mistakes that I found people like Sullivan make, which is like he’s looking for an

05.09.2019: Lukas Fetzko and William Baptiste analyzed the workflows and organization of Boston Valley Terra Cotta's facility for their project, Patchwork, as part of the Situated Technologies Cybernetic Factory studio, taught by Omar Khan. The studio looked at the architecture of advanced manufacuting, reimagining the factory as an interface between local and global, rural and industrial, and craft and automation.

authentic, autochthonous American architecture. And I don’t think that people are looking for a nationalist architecture today, but I think they are looking to something that’s of the moment that expresses the kind of zeitgeist—this notion of digital emergence, or some form of cultural intelligence.

And I think that that’s a mistake that we’re seeing made in certain schools. And I don’t know that it’s necessarily being made here. There’s an attempt that I see in some of the thesis projects that situate these efforts in actual places, and in actual traditions—cultural traditions—and I think it could be quite interesting if it was fully theorized.

In the UB context, there’s a kind of continuing discussion we’re having with modernity, but there’s a way that we can relate the Situated Technologies experiment with that conversation. It’s not just performance-based work, it’s not just a kind of imminent, the display of the algorithm, and the kind of unique intelligence of genetic algorithm… It’s something else. It’s grafting other sorts of things, which I think it’s quite interesting, productive, but under-theorized.

AF: I have noticed that there is a strong emphasis on creating projects that are local—that it’s a project in Buffalo, and we’re going to actually physically interact with the space or neighborhood. But I think what becomes problematic is that once we start looking at precedents that are historic—or, even more problematic for students, once we start looking on Instagram—we succumb to… I think it was Heidegger who said something about— the hegemony of the image, or the supremacy of the image.

There’s a vision that I think— a lot of times—we push towards, that’s not this organicism that comes from the soil—from

that place—because I think a lot of our intentions are to make things local, but then we are drawing on things from places or systems that are very far removed.

From a student perspective, I feel like we are taught from the offset that rationale validates legitimacy. “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?” and so forth, at every step along the way. If we’re looking to explore and create something that is a true creation, having this necessity to perpetually be explaining why you're doing this, you see how criticisms—and outside inputs—influence whatever it is you’re creating.

So to create something of the moment, I think it requires you to be in the moment.

I think the school needs to interact more with the physical streets of Buffalo because we do all these projects for Buffalo within Hayes Hall, and it doesn’t always transfer out. We aren’t seeing—we aren’t engaging with the public, and so we’re kind of creating fantasy pieces that could actually be impactful.

HS: One thing that does always give me pause, though, is when people talk about “local.” You know, the Nazis used the rhetoric of the “local” in a distinctly opposite way, in relation to people who are not of the soil—of this soil. So when you talk, you know, one talks about things that grow from the soil, there are—by nature—things that are excluded from that discussion, always.

I came to Buffalo because it was off-thecenter, right? And most of the time I like this condition for the opportunities posed by not being in the center. I think that there’s something about American architecture—experimental architecture in weird places… Like you go to Toledo, Ohio—when I went there, I was like, “What is this doing here?” And there’s

these things that happen off where the dominant discourse is not happening.

It’s kind of interesting. And I think that the school here could take more advantage of its oblique position, which it does not.

“we are taught that rationale validates legitimacy . . . having the necessity to perpetually be explaining why you're doing this, you see how criticisms—and outside inputs—influence whatever it is you’re creating. ” - aubrey fan

I don’t think that we do enough with the uniqueness of our position, and I think to just default to wanting to be local is not the answer for me. But this is different from what you’re saying.

I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be public engagement. And I think that there are parts—there are different roles that different people play in schools—and some people... Like, their goal is that public engagement and some But for people that do things like I do, which is not, by nature… not really going to engage the public in the same way. I’m not going to go to the street and start expounding on architectural theory! But there is—I think, for me—a little bit of this irony in the fact that the school so heavily relies on precedent, or on modernist thinking, and pays very little attention to history/theory at the same time. And yet, there’s the sense that historiography is going on, or looking to the past in studios. How does that happen? That students know so little

about the culture of architecture, and yet they’re being asked to draw on the culture of architecture without understanding the positions they’re taking by doing so. That drives me crazy.

CD: There is this idea of the humanist architect who knows enough about history to infuse his or her designs with some kind of historical content, but is not an expert in history. There’s a sense that history gives us more material to the mind as a designer, as opposed to being held responsible for understanding the context.

But we’re not in that moment. We’re not in the modernist moment, or the postmodernist moment. So we should be able to look back and to understand that those attitudes were limited, and there were dangers associated with those positions— that if you use history irresponsibly in that way, you’re actually bringing along baggage that you don’t understand, and that you can’t account for. But if you are more broadly bred on the historical side, and you understand these things, not only are you mining their immediate motif or aesthetic, but you’re mining that school of thought—that world of thinking.

But we also invented the “local,” but we never had to think about what the local is—it just was. We use the local to say that we’re doing “good,” and we use utopia to say we’re going to do experimental things. Those are fiction forms. And what I think Sullivan is saying is that we need to engage with the now, as you were saying, that there’s a risk of just accepting what is happening and not trying to fix it.

If I were to critique UB’s program at all, it wouldn’t be its continual engagement with this language of modernity. I think that that’s actually pretty productive. It wouldn’t be its aggregation or adding of these contemporary discourses.

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For me, it’s the lack of substantive way that we engage with the public. That we don’t have folks who come from the East Side or come from the West Side who are designers and come to teach here. We don’t have a professor of practice who is situated in the school, but creates a bridge to those spaces. Or we have folks who do—I don’t know, thesis projects in the East Side, but they never talked to anybody in the East Side. That’s just really bizarre. It’s not like on the West Coast somewhere, it’s literally up the street. And so, I think that there’s a kind of institutional culture that has emerged that says that we have to maintain a kind of avant-gardist position within the city and that’s our relationship to the local culture.

There are ways that the university can serve as a different kind of organ within the city that is both experimental, and deeply embedded within place, but still pushing people to do something that is designoriented—that is expressive of their unique conditions.

I think many of our thesis students do that very well because they come from the city, and they bring those experiences with them. There are many forces today, but I think that’s why Sullivan said that these institutions are pernicious. Not because they were consciously pernicious, but because institutionally, they push towards a formalization. When we think about studio instruction, it’s easier to teach and test students simple principles of form, than it is to test their understanding of local conditions… and to really assess strictly how they do that, how they translate that into material form. Because honestly, it would be hard for faculty to understand that. So to expect the student to understand that, it’s really difficult.

So I think that architectural education— since it isn’t a knowledge-producing area— it’s hard to say substantively you’ve done

this well and you’ve done that poorly. And so, we create these shortcuts to do that.

And I feel we over rely on that at times, which prevents us from seeing things and experimenting in certain ways. That’s what I feel is the substance of Sullivan—what I would take from Sullivan.

But if we follow on his route, then what we really need are people from different backgrounds trying to create an American architecture for their space. And that isn’t the local in broad terms, or the global in broad terms, because those are always quotations. They are fictions, they’re generalizations, but literally taking-on the experience and bringing architecture back to that space. I feel if we structure architecture education that way, then studios would be very different because we’d be looking to the student to say, “Well, what did you bring here from where you grew up? What are you engaging with in terms of how you’re applying these elements?” and not challenging them to either continue doing things within this canon, or to build for a community that they don’t understand.

MG: I think there are a couple of good points here. There are a couple of different ideas in terms of context related to when this piece came out, and when it was quoted. There was a little bit of talk about 1971 and what was happening at the school at that time, and it was a very different moment.

There was so much this expression, I believe, with the democratic process, as well as—if we look back at the BeauxArts being a state institution trying to create this nationalistic style, and if we look at UB as a state institution, there is this complete disconnect between what was happening with the Beaux Arts and what’s happened here. Even between the schools here—and I think as someone that came through the school, there’s always this question of, “What am

I missing educationally from someone who goes to a private institution, and how democratic is this place?”

HS: Universities are not democracies at all.

Let’s not live under any illusion that this is a democratic institution.

CD: They literally are corporations, and they operate that way. This notion of academic freedom is one that pushes against this idea of the hierarchy that one respects in a corporation. I think that we tend to popularize universities as havens of academic freedom without also understanding that they are corporations within an institutional culture.

HS: They so much are, more and more.

And, I will also say this. Look at your professors at UB and where they went to school. The state university is entirely populated by graduates of private universities, almost across the board in every field. Why is that? What does that mean? You’re getting an education from people who go to these other schools.

What does that say about the state’s own concept of itself?

What do we think that we’re educating people for? I want to ask that question.

It really bothers me a lot. I want to know, and I don’t have an answer for this, what the educational agenda is now— the state school. And I really believe in public education. I’d like to believe that we have some sort of goal beyond pushing people through a system so that they take employment value down the chain of command, so to speak.

CD: But the purpose and the mission of state schools of higher education has shifted historically. Before SUNY, there were a whole series of land-grant institutions that were literally meant to train professionals who were going to work locally. And so there was a direct

relation between the local economy and those who were trained. You’d expect people who worked in the town to go to school at the local university.

And so, now you have a landscape of higher education that is incredibly schizophrenic. It can no longer focus on letting a person discover who they are, and understand the kind of citizen they want to be. It can no longer be a kind of apprenticeship model alone—a preprofessional kind of thing, and it can no longer just be an exploration of ideas and knowledge production.

Because you’re having state schools having to perform three or four civic functions that were previously done otherwise, universities—particularly state universities, because they’re cash-strapped… late in the game of philanthropy and fundraising, and don’t have the endowments that private universities have—have to make some really hard decisions. How do we keep up with private institutions, and other public institutions that are further along, while still maintaining our mission of local?

In that sense, I say that the state school is actually in crisis. And that UB is actually in crisis. It’s trying to deal with constructing a new reality for the 21st century that they didn’t have to construct in the 20th century. And I don’t know that our modernist pedagogy prepares us well for that.

MF: On this note of the lack of democracy, or the myth of democracy that you both are talking about—because it’s an interesting sort of segue to think about that—I want to talk a little bit about research and how that sort of prevents democracy in schools for a lot of different reasons. It shuts out a lot of people—if you don’t have the research interest of the five particular silos, then you’re saddled with teaching the sophomores until you’re dead. But

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11.20.2019: Beth Tauke and Jaidon Ramirez Zeno work with children as part of the Architecture + Education Program, using architectural concepts to teach students in Buffalo Public Schools. (photo by Douglas Levere)

another thing is this idea among the teachers—or a crisis that we have—is that our best seniors should go elsewhere for graduate school. Try and get them into an Ivy League institution.

But then we also want to create excitement about our graduate program. This year, I think it was sort of a big deal that we had so much retention, but I know that there is this thing among the teachers that… you know, the top students—the strong students—should leave.

HS: I would give that advice to any student no matter how I regarded their skills. I don’t think it’s great for people to stay, necessarily, unless they have a good reason. Always, my apologies to those in the same institution for their entire education, because they don’t get a diversity of experience. And— CD: Or networks…

HS: And, yes, networks. That is also the case. And—like you say—you don’t think of this when you’re a student. I certainly did not. But, did I benefit from it? Oh, yes. I mean, the people that I know from the places that I went to school— they’re the movers and the shakers of all kinds of things. But that’s the question of now a structural thing. We want to keep our best students and we want to keep students here, but we also want to educate them, and we know that educating them also means letting them go. We want them because we want our program to be strong, but we want them to go. It’s like we’re caught in a catch-22.

CD: Well, the other issue, I think, is—and this is on every institution—the issue of labor and student labor. And if you’re in studio, I can tell you that well, what you’re doing is you’re learning a kind of artistic skill, so you don’t need to worry about how many hours you’re putting in or whatever.

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Do as many hours as you need to make the work look good, right? But in reality, that is a reflection on the faculty member in charge, and they get to put that work in their teaching portfolio, and it makes them look good. The way that one steals labor from the level beneath is happening all the way up to the head of the firm.

This comes from the model of being the artist–architect, as opposed to being the competent professional.

And so we have a labor issue, where the fact is that the work won’t look as good as the Ivies, yet they push you to produce work that looks as good as the Ivies—and so the work that you’re doing has to legitimize that. It might help you as well, if you go and apply to an Ivy, but it’s all part of that same cycle. And so, there is a sort of economy within architectural education that I feel has a kind of class hierarchy.

There’s a kind of credentialization that goes into creating the “haves” and the “have-nots.” And that has nothing to do with the quality of education one receives.

HS: So, you can actually, I think, get a better education outside of those schools.

Those schools are suffocating in a lot of ways.

In some ways, I think that it’s liberating to be here because you don’t have to conform by necessity to somebody else’s vision of what architecture is. If you’re an independently-minded person, you can really do your own thing here, which I really love.

CD: But that’s literally what he’s saying, in terms of architectural education.

It’s like he’s saying that what they do is actually beat the creativity out of folks— the kind of creativity that he thinks was essential for making the architecture that was meaningful and that was actually important.

And that’s part of what your architectural education is. It’s not just coming here and doing great design stuff, but it’s also understanding that you are inheriting a professional culture and you need to place yourself within that space. And I feel like UB does exactly what it says, which is

aware of. This is a profession. It has its own economy, and you have to know that to be able to make decisions about anything.

AF: There’s this active selection of who the winners and losers are, in a sense. And you sort of mentioned that we want to give

04.03.2019: Brian Carter and Alfred Cai discuss Alfred's junior project, Rider's Villa, which incorporated the concept of "building within a building" to aid in the building's resilience. (photo by Yifan He)

that it allows you to just think whatever you want to think.

But I think that what we could do—and not just us, but everyone—is to give people a sense of what that landscape is, and what they’ve inherited. Because how are you going to make a decision if you don’t know that world.

And so I think that if this is sort of meant to be consumed by students, and they’re supposed to understand what architecture education offers them, the opportunities they have, and the responsibilities they might have that they’re not currently

the best students the best opportunities.

Because if we get seven people to go to the GSD, that that makes you and me look better. We land people at Zaha Hadid and other big-name firms, it makes us look better. But these opportunities—they should start with freshmen—they should understand and be given access to, if we are trying to promote a democracy, which I think there’s still some contention about that. But they should be given access to at least the understanding of how to get scholarships, how to work for a professor, or be integrated into a professor’s research. People are hand-picked, and you

often see the same set of people getting a lot of these opportunities.

HS: You’re absolutely right. So here’s an example, like Harvard wants its graduate students, even its undergraduate students and faculty, to get as many grants as possible, right? So they have an office dedicated to that pursuit. They have every grant listed, they tell you how to do it, they have workshops in how to apply for things.

We have nothing like that here.

CD: But when you think about it from the institution’s perspective, we should talk about the changing pressures in the twenty-first century—the fact that we have to do two, three more jobs than we had to do previously. But we’ve always had students at UB who got into Ivies, and we’ve always had students get jobs in really good offices. In that sense, those students, they are already well-prepared for college. They don’t have to do anything; you just let them in. You leave them alone. They make you look good.

And there’s no work involved. So, ethically, there’s a responsibility, but in terms of the amount of resources and the culture, etcetera—like the support that you need to do that—it’s hard.

It has become doubly and triply hard today. So we might be able to say that ethically there was a responsibility, but actually saying, "How do you do this?

How do you have an office that has all this knowledge?" Folks who are on faculty who have won these awards that demonstrate you can do this. Students who've won these scholarships, means we can tell other students about them. Having that, and formalizing it—that's extra work, and that is work that Ivies don't have to do.

So in a sense, I feel like part of it, just to be fair to UB and other state institutions— is that we’re asking them to do more with less. We’re demanding that they ethically

serve a general public that is either gleaned from by the Ivies or ignored completely. But we’re not giving them the money that they need to have to do it, or we’re not giving them the resources that they need to do it.

And so in that sense, I think the question that you’re raising is not just about the School of Architecture Planning, and it’s not just about higher education. It’s about the politics that navigates higher education of the twenty-first century. That make it a vocational space instead of an educational, academic space. And let’s start with a resource, so I can do nothing else but that job. That’s what I think is pernicious.

HS: Nobody told me, “Oh okay, so that’s how this works.” I didn’t have the wherewithal to understand all of the implications that I feel feedback can actually end up dictating in your life. I don’t know how one brings that effectively to bear. How do you say to people like, “Listen, you should really understand that all the choices you’re making have implications for you in these different ways” and— CD: I just say it flat out, to every person of color that is a student in my class. I say, “You are inheriting a field that either ignores you or underestimates you. And you need to have as many credentials as possible to get over the biases in our field.” I tell this to freshman, sophomores, whomever is in my office doing this work.

Because if you're a white male student who's gone to private school, you're fine.

In a space like Buffalo, it's 90% white folks who are in charge of things. They're going to look at you, they're going to see someone who's common, who has common interests etcetera. If you’re a woman or a person of color, the world is different, and you cannot look at it in the same way.

In the 1920s, America was a much more diverse place, but our canon is not and that’s not accidental. There’s a way that that maps on to and reproduces power from hundreds and hundreds of years before.

And so this is something that, it’s a burden that we placed on students. But you have to know this, you have to know this, and I blame folks who come in here with this attitude that we can just do formalism—that it can just be design exercises. There are no stakes to it. That’s bullshit. Everything you do in a restricted, segregated space has stakes, and you need to understand that. If you’re a person of color who willingly comes into this space, you need to know your options require you do this, or they’re extremely limited. And I think that that transparency is what we ethically need to give our students, because then everyone’s working towards the same goal.

So, at least then they have chances and options, and you’re not just taking their tuition money and then saying “Good luck. Hope you get a job. Hope you can pay for yourself.” That is—I think— incredibly unethical and incredibly ridiculous. And perniciously, it would just repeat the same cycle and because these people have no knowledge, they don’t know what they’re signing up for. If you’re a professor, and you know that, and you don’t tell them, I think that’s the biggest unethical act.

MF: This conversation has been really helpful for me in this as a studio instructor, just because... there’s a sort of crisis in bravery, I think, among a lot of the faculty about things like that, and that sort of trickles down to the students as well. And it’s related to this idea that I shouldn’t bring my background to this. When you’re not bringing your background to it, then we’re actually replicating the straight white male profession that it is. So I think that just learning how to articulate… and like you were saying, you bring it up on the

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first day of school, in the first year—you tell people about the promise of Buffalo. I feel like I’ve said things that are depressing to you about your alma mater, but in fact there is promise, there is promise because it’s off the beaten track, because it’s— HS: I absolutely think that that’s true.

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“it's important to emphasize that the freedom you have here is—i think—something which can be cultivated. you guys should be more agitational. you should care more; you should speak up more.”

- hadas steiner

MF: And the landscape of opportunities that you’re talking about— CD: Is different.

MF: This is what’s available to you here. I think we don’t tell the students that there’s so much possibility. I’ve never said that to a student… And then they’re not brave either. So I think that for me, this has actually been really, really helpful. Maybe for next year’s class… it’s too late now.

AF: I also wanted to add—because this is the third state institution I’ve attended, that the architecture department here is really unique. I have never had such strong or close relationships with faculty. It’s very close-knit—and insular, which has a whole slew of problems that come with it—but the scale and the size and the amount of support and care that most professors

actually have for the students is palpable.

For my other master’s in education, it was a similarly small group, but you could take someone’s course and they wouldn’t know your name the next year. Whereas I feel like here—maybe it’s because of the studio—but I think a lot of it has to do with Buffalo and the culture of the institution.

That there’s more investment in the students as people.

HS: But it is a little bit because our architecture school is smaller. And you get more one-to-one.

CD: Yes, studios are so intense in terms of one-on-one, that there’s an expectation.

HS: It’s important to emphasize that the freedom you have here is—I think— something which can be cultivated. You guys should be more agitational. You should care more; you should speak up more.

CD: When I went to school here, it was standard to challenge the curriculum.

Nobody does that now. It’s so conformist.

There’s a kind of lack of courage that’s there. Part of it is because they’re afraid of how much money they’re spending, and they want to get a job.

But I think that the situation’s changed.

I know with the Pell grants and the Tap monies things have changed. If you were an African-American, or a first-generation student, if you didn’t know what you were doing, you could still graduate without debt. There were safety nets, and those are gone now. We’ve required that students be brave. You have to be courageous and say, “This is my education, I’m paying for it. I want to do something meaningful, something substantive.” And very few students have that attitude. They have the attitude of, “I’m a customer. Give me what I need as a customer.”

MF: Transactional.

AF: At the same time we should also make sure students are able to evaluate their own work because I think that’s part of the complacency you’re talking about. Yeah, I think we all want to be right, we want to get a job, and we aren’t often encouraged to be self-critical.

HS: Everybody wants to be able to do what they want to do, but we know we need to do it for money. I feel like it’s a sad goal. I feel like when a student says, “I’m doing this because I want to get a job,” it makes me a little sad. They’re not doing it because they’re passionate about some aspect of the field.

AF: Well, I think we’re waiting to be told “You’re right.” Like, I want to try seven ideas, and then I’m going to wait, and when Mustafa tells me which idea is the good idea, then I’m going to say, “Okay, I’m going to go with that one,” right?

And I think that we’re maybe failing to encourage people to have the gumption to say, “No, my heart is with this idea. I’m going to follow it through.” And then your role as an educator is more to facilitate me on how that idea might best come to fruition. Less the arbiter of yes and no.

MF: Because the student sometimes has decided already what’s right. They’ve self-prescribed, and so they’ve kind of decided what the right answer is.

I feel like I have students from the A to B- range, but I just feel like I’m giving the As to the students who produce the most work—the most productive ones. But with each thing they produce, it’s more and more conservative. And I feel like I could actually flip it around, to give the lower grades to the least productive students.

But they’ve kind of—in their weak and weird way, produced interesting things—just not enough of it. And maybe if they produced

more work, they would go up, and I feel like I could just flip the entire grading thing around… The crisis of bravery.

HS: But I feel like we're asked to do just that with the syllabus being a contract. You know...like, all of these things, we're aksed to buy into the idea that the students are our clients. And I find that so— MF: Worrying.

HS: It just… makes me profoundly sad and worried about the state of higher education. And also, the fact that knowledge has become instrumentalized to job seeking. It’s like—sometimes you learn things for no reason; you don’t know why you need to know something necessarily in advance. And sometimes, twenty years later, it becomes applicable.

And sometimes two years later it becomes applicable. But you have to have a balance of both kinds of knowledge—things you learn for the sake of learning, and things that you learn because you have to be employable. And if one can achieve a sense of balance across these objectives, then you’re earning a good education.

MODERATOR MICHAEL GAC: MArch Student PARTICIPANTS CHARLES DAVIS II: Assisstant Professor Department of Architecture AUBREY FAN: MArch Student

MUSTAFA FARUKI: Adjunct Instructor - Department of Architecture

HADAS STEINER: Associate Professor - Department of Architecture

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dom-ino effect revisited Students: Faculty:

sophomore studio fall 2019; ARC 201 152

This past fall, the sophomore studio engaged morphology and context through precedent investigations.

Everyone began by studying Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino, designed in 1914.

This theoretical project’s ideas of “free plan” and “free façade” revolutionized architectural design for the industrial era, creating a structural and spatial model reliant on slab, column, and stair.

The students were tasked with studying a built work that corresponded with and exploited one of the architectural elements from Dom-Ino: slab, column, or stair. Through critical analysis of precedent and Corbusier’s spatial and structural theories, students developed their own morphological systems based on one of these elements. The systems were then applied to the context of Artpark in Lewiston, New York, providing a set of residences for visiting artists.

SLAB Alexandra Marchioli studied the slab through the Oslo Opera House in Oslo, Norway, by Snøhetta. She began to use the slab as a mode of spatial engagement.

She explored how different slopes affect

Team:

Program:

Caterina Gnecco (stair), Christian Hallgren (column), Alexandria Marchioli (slab) Julia Jamrozik

Seth Amman, Mustafa Faruki, Julia Jamrozik, Noellan Niespodzinski, Joey Swerdin, Jin Young Song (coordinator) BS Arch

space through a series of paper studies, utilizing simple functions such as folding and cutting. By folding the slabs, she created a system of ramps that allowed for a continuous movement of space.

As the slab began to inform both structure and space, Marchioli used columns only where necessary as a secondary element to her system. She further defined different spaces by introducing a lightweight wire system that utilized a wrapping technique and tension to create enclosure.

STAIR Caterina Gnecco focused on the stair, studyng the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center by Dillar Scofidio and Renfro. Interested in how stairs could function as both circulation and social gathering spaces, Gnecco began to explore different spatial conditions both above and below stairs.

Gnecco’s design allowed the stair to become the sole structural component, taking on the roles of both column and slab. By manipulating the scale proportions of the riser and tread, the structure was able to perform differently

site model of residences in Artpark

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Stair: final model photo (top); Slab: process model photo (bottom)

according to programmatic and spatial needs. This system was adjusted to accommodate display spaces, circulation, and seating. It also provided gallery space, inviting visitors by extending into the landscape.

COLUMN Christian Hallgren studied Go Hasegawa’s Pilotis in the Forest, focusing on how the column influences spatial conditions.

Hallgren drew strongly from both this precedent and Corbusier’s Dom-Ino, using columns to elevate space and keep the plan simple and open.

The structure touches the ground lightly, keeping the design intervention on the site to a minimum. The tall, slender columns and elevated spaces act to integrate the structure as part of the forest system.

Column: section drawing (top); rendering showing the design's integration into forest (bottom)

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good neighbors

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3.5 year graduate studio fall 2019; ARC 501

The Good Neighbors studio is the first in the sequence of the 3.5 year MArch program. Students from diverse academic backgrounds examine the house as the principle manifestation of the domestic space, where privacy meets the urban condition as a way to develop a better understanding of the built environment.

Buffalo is known as the City of Good Neighbors. Such a title coexists with others like the Queen City or the Electric City. These names highlight very particular conditions of the City of Buffalo within the American urban, architectural, and social scene. The focus of this studio was to explore space at the domestic scale in Buffalo.

Understanding the scale of the domestic space, where privacy meets the urban condition, will help students facilitate a better understanding of the built environment. While the home is the ultimate private space for people, it is also one of the most experimental spaces, a first testing-place for all architecturerelated aspects.

This graduate studio focused on domestic space, as well as space for creation and coexistence. By reflecting on the house as

Students: Faculty:

Phuong Vu (Comfort Caves), Keith Benes (Topobliqueness) Miguel Guitart

Program: MArch

the space for intimacy, creation, relation, and coexistence, it becomes the very first unit of mankind’s largest and most complex construction: the city.

The project required three detached units for three families and three types of creative activities: writing, composing, and painting. Each family had unique spatial needs for both their craft and their very different lifestyles. As all three families share a single property, the goal was to create private, independent space while encouraging neighborly relations through shared open space.

Students were given hypothetical backgrounds for the three families: an older couple who are both musicians, enjoy baking, and require a music studio; a large family of seven, the mother of which is a Pulitzer-prize winner who needs a writing studio; and a single painter who desires a bright studio where she can paint and display large 6’x6’ pieces.

In response to these scenarios, students generated proposals that tell the story of each of the occupants and reflect their lives in the way their spaces are organized.

COMFORT CAVES Vu’s Comfort Caves was influenced by the complicated feelings of neighbors sharing a site together. The project mainly focuses on a parametric roof that connects the three houses and three studios together.

This overarching structure provides shelter and daylight, as well as a unifying feature to physically bring the occupants together.

The design encourages neighborly interaction by providing shared exterior spaces that fall under the parametric canopy.

Josef Albers’s painting, Homage to The Square: Ascending, helps to inspire the decisions of lights and boundaries throughout the buildings. The roof structure, which is mostly made of metal, is interspersed with strategically-placed glass panels to bring natural light into the living and workspaces.

The proposal takes shape as natural cavelike forms with the intention of providing spaces where the occupants feel both comfortable and secure. The design, which is meant to be more organic and atypical, aims to inspire creative work in the studios.

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Comfort Caves: conceptual sketch (top-left); plan showing relationships between family units and exterior spaces (bottom-left); exploded axonometric showing structural canopy (right)

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12.22.2019: Topobliqueness explores the relationship between home and landscape, allowing the roof to become both green space and recreational space.

TOPOBLIQUENESS Benes’ proposal integrates the three houses and three studios into their topographic surroundings. Similar to the remnants of ancient volcanos in the American South-West, the homes rise from the landscape as clear masses, but are firmly connected to the ground by earthen embankments. An ambiguous relationship develops between house and ground.

The proposal also explored how an oblique condition would affect the spatial experience of a street and a home. Benes rotated the traditional lot, perpendicular to the street, by 30 degrees to create diagonal striations across the site. By emphasizing strong diagonal elements in both plan and section, soft barriers promote privacy for families while presenting a green façade to the street.

In addition to providing a separation from the neighbors, the inclined lawn

can be used for a variety of activities, including sledding, reading, lounging, and picnicking.

Extruding walls from the ground plane create an artificial landscape. The faces are inclined 30 degrees towards the street and 15 degrees towards the rear neighbors. These retaining walls support earthen embankments and green roofs, further blurring the line between house and landscape.

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Topobliqueness: elevation drawing

Topobliqueness: model photo

kaisertown development plan Students:

senior studio fall 2019; END 450 160

Faculty:

TA:

Craig Bingham, Daisy Castro, Bridget Dooley, Tiffany Fong, Govind Grewal, Min Hua Huang, Rey Medina, Sulaiman Meriles Demry, Joshep Meyers, Shyne Mon, Christian Oliveira Demelo, Joseph Panella, Marco Pasqualetti, Alex Piasecki, Tyler Vorasane, Yiming (Peter) Zhu Jeffrey Rehler

Jocelyne Bello

Program: BAED

The Kaisertown Neighborhood Development Plan aims to strengthen Kaisertown’s existing assets through a series of improvements. The intention of the studio was to promote the neighborhood’s social participation, economic development, main commercial corridors, and urban environment as well as raise awareness of Kaisertown within the region and the context of Buffalo. This can be achieved through a series of proposals specific to each zone of improvement. These focus areas consist of Kaisertown’s Main Streets, Houghton Park, and Waterfront.

Recommendations should be forward-thinking, relevant yearround, and kept in context with Kaisertown. All development will aim to be sustainable in efforts to protect and bolster cultural and physical assets that make Kaisertown unique. The neighborhood and main street area will be made accessible to all by prioritizing inter-municipal coordination and enhancing connectivity with the region. These positive and conceivable changes can be accomplished with the help of dedicated residents as well as the studio’s client, the Kaisertown Friends Association.

process, as it gave the studio the opportunity to see Kaisertown firsthand. The next step in the planning process was to look at other comprehensive plans to establish the planning context.

These plans pertained to the study areas of Buffalo, West Seneca and Cheektowaga. Working in teams, the studio reviewed One Region Forward: A New Way to Plan for Buffalo Niagara; Queen City in the 21st Century - Buffalo’s Comprehensive Plan; and the comprehensive plans for both West Seneca and Cheektowaga.

These plans informed broad takeaways and knowledge around what planning initiatives are already taking place in the study area.

It became an important goal to preserve Kaisertown’s rich history while still allowing flexibility for change. This plan hopes to not only address physical improvements in the neighborhood, but improve the quality of lives of the residents. Although catering to Kaisertown’s aging population is a significant objective, the plan is to implement change that influence Kaisertown to grow and contribute to the revitalization of the City of Buffalo by increasing the diversity of the neighborhood. Kaisertown’s untapped potential is not only seen as a resource to improve the neighborhood but the Western New York region as a whole.

3. Housing, Community Health and Recreation

The first step was to analyze the existing conditions of Kaisertown.

A site visit became one of the most crucial steps to their research

Following the site visit, the studio did further research into the existing conditions of Kaisertown. The class split into five groups and covered five different topics: 1. Demographics and Economic Profile 2. Land Use, Natural Environment and Built Form

4. Community Institutions, History, Arts and Culture 5. Transportation and Connectivity These topics were used throughout the semester and played a major role in narrowing down recommendations and proposals for Kaisertown. Next, the focus switched to look outside of Kaisertown and find some best practices from other cities and neighborhoods. Teams were challenged to find case studies with supporting precedent studies that would be beneficial in making recommendations, focusing on business district revitalization,

healthy aging, and waterfront access and development. Examples were pulled from all over the country, and even internationally.

Before looking into proposals for Kaisertown, it was important to understand the current conditions of the neighborhood.

A considerable amount of time was spent studying the area through site visits, interactions with community members, and research. The background information obtained about Kaisertown through this method of research was deemed necessary to make beneficial recommendations, which were then organized into four key categories: transportation, economic development, social participation, and urban environment.

Increasing awareness of and accessibility to alternate modes of transportation is an important factor that drives all other areas

rendering of park entrance

of improvement. Transportation by automobile dominates Kaisertown, with much of the residential neighborhood bordered by highways on all sides, restricting access to the neighborhood to underpasses and bridges over the Buffalo River. Kaisertown can currently be reached by the many NFTA bus stops along Clinton and South Ogden Street. Biking is also an accessible mode of transportation in Kaisertown, however there is only one shared bike lane which occupies South Ogden Street. Since Kaisertown is dense in size, walking is also a feasible option for residents. Kaisertown’s main commercial strip, known as Clinton Street, has recently made efforts to increase the walkability by adding new crosswalks. However, South Ogden Street, the town’s other main transportation corridor, is lacking up-to-date crosswalks. This raises concerns for pedestrians due to the high traffic speeds in this area. There are tremendous opportunities to

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expand transportation options in and around Kaisertown; doing so is one way to achieve the overall vision for improvement.

One can easily realize Kaisertown’s potential for economic growth. However, there are many vacant storefronts that are prohibiting the economic boost the neighborhood needs.

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Seemingly, Kaisertown appears to be heavily residential with many of the vacant businesses on Kaisertown’s main commercial strips or its waterfront. Clinton Street currently serves as the town’s lifeline, contributing to the neighborhood’s economic vitality.

There are also few community centers throughout the town that serve as places for residents to hold events that bring in revenue, although most of Kaisertown’s potential for economic growth lies on the waterfront due to most of Clinton Street already maintaining a considerably lively status.

One of Kaisertown’s biggest strengths is the people living in it.

There is a strong sense of pride for the neighborhood, and many of the families living there have been there for generations. The current population of Kaisertown has a high level of aging adults.

Social participation is extremely important for social and mental health for people of all ages, but the older generation is often excluded when social events and programs are organized. Within

map showing municipal boundaries within Kaisertown

Kaisertown, there is one senior community center. Autumnwood Senior Center sits on Clinton Street in the northwestern corner of the neighborhood, near Houghton Park. This is the primary option for Kaisertown’s senior community members in providing recreational opportunities and social interaction. There is a huge opportunity to increase not only the number of facilities, but also the types of activities for social participation between Kaisertown’s residents and even guests of the community.

Kaisertown is fortunate enough to have Houghton Park, a large park within the boundaries of the neighborhood. Deeper within the park, there are a series of trails that lead to the Buffalo River, giving a more natural, undeveloped landscape for true nature lovers. Outside of the park, Kaisertown is lacking a continuation of the natural environment throughout the rest of the neighborhood. In order to develop a resilient Kaisertown, a sustainable Kaisertown must be developed. Integrating elements such as green infrastructure and solar tech can help establish Kaisertown as a leading sustainable community.

(Excerpts taken from the student report, Kaisertown Development Plan)

proposal for a community garden within the public park

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proposal for Fenton Street lot

UB HIDA CAMP Students:

japan study abroad program summer 2019 164

This workshop was the third visit to Hida by the University at Buffalo and is part of a nine-week study abroad program in Japan.

The program provides students with both an urban and rural contemporary and historical experience. Students study both the local architecture and history of Tokyo, Hida, and various other significant historical and architectural locations. The UB Hida Camp is designed to expose students to rich historical traditions while experimenting with new technologies.

This year, the goal was to design and build a large prototype that combined Ibata’s timber compression techniques with historical basket-weaving techniques.

The prototyping was intended to test the bending limitations of compressed timber and to imagine new uses for the material outside of the scope of Ibata’s current product line. This project proposal was inspired by the change in materiality due to the compression process; hard timber is transformed to be more flexible and pliable. This flexibility allowed the team to weave complex forms using thick timber laths, which would have been impossible with non-compressed hardwoods. By design, the weaving pattern can create large surfaces from small wooden parts.

This technique makes it possible to

Faculty: Program:

Autumn Bender, Eryn Conlon, Nicholas Eichelberger, Benjamin Ezquerra, Marissa Hayden, Olivia He, Nicholas Hills, Jennifer Persico, Mira Shami, Christopher Sweeney, Austin Wyles Nicholas Bruscia (program director), Daiki Kanaoka (FabCafe Toyko), Junichiro Horikawa (FabCafe Toyko) BS Arch, MArch

imagine woven architectural structures that use small-diameter hardwood trees.

The studio developed a computational form-finding technique to aid in the design process. Although many physical models made from paper and plastic were built by the students, the digital simulations are able to predict, to some degree, how the material will bend when woven and what form will emerge from the weaving process. The final prototypes were designed as a result of an iterative process of creating numerous small-scale physical models and digital simulations.

When complete, a woven surface is much stronger than the thin pieces to create it, flexible but formed, aesthetically beautiful, and culturally influenced. While there are centuries of cultural artifacts around the world that demonstrate this, weaving with timber at a larger scale remains a worthwhile area of architectural investigation for the same reasons.

The studio adopted the traditional Japanese kagome pattern, known more technically as a tri-axial weaving pattern and used the same shaping techniques practiced by traditional basket weavers to workshop reference sheet

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Hida Prototype B: exploded axonometric of weaving pattern

build several dozen woven paper models to explore a variety of design proposals.

Unlike traditional woven surfaces, these prototypes are bolted at every overlapped connection. This ensures ease of assembly since the twisting of the timber laths requires considerable force to hold the material in place. As the bolts are tightened, the laths are gradually pressed together, forming a stronger connection and ensuring the desired curvature.

experimental weaving (left and right)

Hida Prototype A is a geometrically complex sculptural form that resembles growth patterns and forms commonly

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07.23.2019: Students assemble a scale mockup of Hida Prototype A to test the limitations of hardwood in compression.

found in nature. The curvature is purely a result of the process. If built again using the same process, a slightly different form would emerge. Although the smallerscale studies with paper and plastic were built using an identical process with proportional spacing, each model and prototype differed in overall form while the bending and twisting radii remained the same. Theoretically, if the spacing is proportional to the bending capacity of the material, highly complex forms such as this are possible at any scale.

and to demonstrate potential uses for hardwoods that would not be possible without it. Each timber lath was bent and twisted in multiple directions, and no splitting or cracking was observed at this scale.

This prototype intended to test the limitations of the compression process

The form consists of both positive and negative curvature and has two cylindrical,

Hida Prototype B is a half-scale version of a potential roof canopy or small summer pavilion. The goal was to demonstrate more control over the weaving process by combining two form-finding methods to create a single, cohesive structure.

closed loops that form columns to support the cantilevering roof. The cylindrical columns gradually change shape as they transition into a saddle surface that extends upward and outward to shade the space below. The design for this prototype is intended to be rebuilt in the future at twice the size with 10-mm thick compressed timber laths with increased spacing to cover an area large enough for a small group of people.

As the closing piece, this conversation with our departmental chairs projects and discusses trajectories, growth, and culture within the School of Architecture and Planning. Topics ranged from questioning the expansion of graduate research to speculating on how to increase intellectual reciprocity between faculty and students and developing new ways to engage interdisciplinary work in an educational setting.

REsponse

03.06.2020

Elizabeth Gilman Daniel Hess

Joyce Hwang 170

Korydon Smith

Elizabeth Gilman: How do you guys see the program developing in the next 5, 10 years, or the next 50 years?

Where do you see the school shifting or expanding?

Korydon Smith: I think there are lots of potential answers to that question, and if you were to talk to a wider network of faculty, you would get lots of different answers there. We’re always having conversations in part about applying that same question to the profession and the field and multiple disciplines that surround architecture. What does it mean to provide a professional education toward a profession that is constantly evolving and changing and with different needs? And part of that is responsive, but then part of it is more proactive. In what way do we modify or change our curriculum as a means to have people go out into the field that they themselves are change masters going forward?

The question reverberates across a number of other fields because we see students not only going into architecture but into a lot of allied careers in the construction industry, in fabrication, in government positions, non-profit organizations, and all kinds of things there.

One of the things specific to this school, we have a number of degree programs that we’re looking to build out around the architecture curriculum, and then also bridge between architecture, planning, and real estate development. An example of that is Affordable Housing. To be able to offer programs that are aligned with many of the challenges of the globe today. And so climate change is obviously one of those areas, and we have a sustainability certificate now. Affordable housing could be one of those domains.

The Planning Department has aligned the MUP with the School of Public Health and Health Professions, for MUP/MPH. I think there’s also an expansion into areas related to new digital technologies, and where digital fabrication, digital visualization goes in architectural education, but also how that informs changing practices as well. I think there are a variety of places we could go.

Joyce Hwang: In some of the conversations that you were having with other faculty and students, a really interesting moment I found was when there was a kind of slight disagreement about Eberhard’s attitude toward architectural education. I think you had

characterized it, Lizzy, as something like going against conventions, and then Bob quickly said, “No, it’s not about going against conventions because if you go against conventions, you’re actually recognizing the conventions as driving forces.”

And then it was clarified as pushing boundaries, and I think that clarity of attitude is something that we should be striving for as a department, increasingly.

I don’t think we quite have that right now because there are so many priorities. And maybe not so much priorities, but there are a lot of interests that faculty in general have, which is what the graduate research groups were sort of born from. It was a kind of combination of faculty interest, but also faculty thinking about what are emerging and pressing issues in our field.

And I think, looking at the areas of focus, the graduate research groups and whether or not they continue as such or if they expand, or what are the kinds of new questions that are defining the discipline. I think that’s something that we will need to address very soon, that will start pushing where we go in the next decade or more.

KS: I think for the faculty for quite some time, and maybe since the origins of the school, there’s been value in plurality.

Daniel Hess: One of our emerging areas of faculty research strength is temperature extremes, and how we can adapt our built environments and urban lives to thermal change. We know that there’s concern that the effects of temperature change do not affect all residents and all locations equally, so we would like to better understand where disparities exist and what we can do to address them.

out. It’s not so much that the freshmen drop is one big puddle, and that kind of pushes everything like a tsunami, but I think everyone kind of produces their own water droplet, and they all ripple against each other. So, I think the changes can come from anywhere. They could come from the history curriculum, for example, understanding what the narratives that shape our discipline and shape the way we understand culture are.

EG: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense that it’s not just one moment.

Another upcoming shift in urban planning is how we engage the era of big data. Big data is already out there in the world since our movements, habits, and preferences are tracked by our digital devices. Urban planners are harnessing this data to better understand how we live our lives and how we can improve our lives, and to ensure that we have responsible systems in place to pass along to the next generations.

Which is very heartening for me to see because I think it’s really important that students see the importance of shaping their own futures and taking into their own hands, not necessarily waiting for something to be handed to them.

DH: Agreed.

EG: Yeah, that relates to what a few of the other discussions touched on, teaching students to be brave, fearless designers.

DH: I always like to think that students provide the energy and faculty provide the

As these and other changes happen, I think we’ll have to rely upon urban planning research and practice to ensure that, in all of our actions, we consider equity and inclusivity. Planning should help give a voice to groups who are under-represented in processes related to urban change.

EG: That kind of relates to my next question, relating to these changes and evolutions in the school, do you guys see that more as implementing something in the freshman year and watching it play out? Or is it more student-driven or faculty-driven evolution?

JH: I don’t know if I would say that change is implemented only in freshman year. I think for every studio the faculty teaches or coordinates, or seminar, that there’s an approach to it that it’s almost like a water droplet. It’s like a drop that kind of ripples

02.24.2020: The African American Students of Architecture and Planning (AASAP) aims to create a network of students, community leaders, department faculty, and graduates to establish stronger connections between the School of Architecture and Planning and local communities. The group facilitates engagement of underrepresented students with minority communities in Buffalo. (photo by Melanie Morales)

JH: And students are doing a lot to shape things, too. There is a number of active student groups, as you know. There’s a student group that formed on its own, AASAP, the African American Students for Architecture and Planning, and they’re taking on a lot of initiatives themselves.

continuity in our collaborative teachinglearning community. Our faculty values students’ perspectives and knowledge, and incorporating students’ inputs into the teaching and learning process helps faculty to always remain flexible.

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EG: Right. Shifting gears a little bit, how do you see our program and its relationship to Buffalo growing and changing, or strengthening, through the curriculum?

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JH: The studio that I’m doing is working with Rigidized Metals and a number of others. There are so many different possibilities of collaborating with entities in the city, from industry partners to nonprofit organizations or firms. There was a studio a few years ago that was sponsored by a real estate developer. So there’s a number of different ways that we are working with entities in the city in a way that feels more structured than it was in the past.

KS: That was the word I was just looking for.

JH: When I first started here in 2005, it seemed like things were very unstructured,

and Buffalo seemed like this land of opportunity because there was such little attention paid to certain parts of the city. It just feels like there wasn’t as much oversight or structure for certain things, and people were just randomly doing things in different places. And that seems to be something that’s less of a possibility now, and I don’t know if it’s because of the change in the nature of the city, or the changing emphasis on other types of regulatory structures.

KS: Well, I also think the structuring has become more solidified, and longterm are the partnerships. The faculty and their industry or community-based partners are more long-term, rather than so many ad hoc projects and ad hoc interventions. And that’s not to say that ad hoc projects or ad hoc interventions don’t have their value, they absolutely do, and I think the school has a history of lots of great examples of those things, but the

partnerships tend to be more long-term now.

What that means then is there’s the greater potential for the relationship to have more transformative power in whatever the partnership is, with industry or with community partners or with neighborhoods, for those ties to strengthen in a way where the partnership is more meaningful. But then also, on the faculty research side, for that to have a longer range track record of research, rather than simply one intervention at a time that’s ad hoc. Whereas there is actually a research or practice trajectory that is taking place over multiple years, rather than semester by semester.

DH: In the urban planning programs, we have been highly connected with community and regional partners for a while. Our work in research and teaching—and especially studio courses— is very intertwined with our residents and communities. We’ve noticed that many of the transformative projects seen in Buffalo in recent years were previously tackled by our students and faculty in studio projects.

JH: When I first visited Buffalo, everything seemed like an incredibly well-kept secret.

That was the way I felt it when I first visited as when I was on reviews, and also during my first couple of years here. I just thought, “I can’t believe this has been going on, and I’ve never known about it.” And nowadays, I feel like there are certain things that we understand as being completely structured and already embedded in our system, but others outside of Buffalo see it as the first revealing of a well-hidden secret.

05.29.2019: Sara Svisco and Zach Fields helped make concept models for Joyce Hwang's project, Hidden in Plain Sight, for the "Cyborg Garden, Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives" exhibition in Matadero Madrid.

So it’s interesting that things to us here that feel totally structured are now sort of starting to bubble up more and more to the external world outside of Buffalo, or outside of the small network

of architecture schools within this area.

I think that’s kind of exciting that it could also relate to just the ease of transmitting information now with social media and other things as well. But I do think that there is more knowledge about what happens here in the outside world.

DH: It’s encouraging that the ‘outside world’ has started to recognize the positive change in Buffalo. We had the chance to show this off to about 1,200 urban planners when our department hosted the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 2018. Many of our visitors got a first-hand glimpse of change in Buffalo. It was a proud moment for our department.

KS: Well, and to the tipping point where Buffalo is now, maybe more on the cool and up and coming side of things, rather than a city that once had a gloried past, that it is now seen as a destination point for people to relocate, and for people across all kinds of different domains to find opportunity and innovation and new experiences here.

EG: Something that I’ve been really interested in as I’ve been conducting these discussions is pulling together faculty and students more, getting them in a conversation together. And this idea of kind of collaboration has come up multiple times, whether that’s between faculty and students or just across departments. I know the opportunities are there, but is there a plan to make that more visible for students? I know you mentioned the degree programs that are coming up, is that the main plan for more collaboration between departments?

KS: Good question. So this is where I’ll start, and see if this aligns with what you’re asking. I would say on the faculty side, there’s as much interdisciplinary

collaboration going on faculty to faculty across, and again, across rather unexpected types of partnerships now, as there has ever been. I don’t think that same degree of collaboration has been made fully available to students.

How to make that experience available to students in a meaningful way, so that they can work with engineering students, they can work with art students, they can work with public health students, and they can work with social sciences students in their core work as applied to, again, the field of architecture integrated into the profession, that’s a question.

Curricular opportunities and formalizing new curricula is one way to do that, but I don’t think it’s something we’ve fully figured out. That might be partly because of the evolution of the school, though as well, where we are in terms of our phase of development.

DH: We might not have tapped the full potential of interdisciplinary opportunities for our students, but there are many more possibilities now than there were only a few years ago. I think we’re headed in the right direction. Faculty are certainly comfortable with interdisciplinary collaboration, so the next step is how we can better translate that to student opportunities.

JH: But I think looking at how single courses are structured and who is allowed to take them, could be a way to do it too.

So to develop more seminars or lectures that are open to more people in other disciplines, to develop opportunities that could be opened to more disciplines.

I think there have been discussions about working with the History Department on a project that was put forward by the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, Despina Stratigakos’ office. So there are efforts to do that, but it’s happening in multiple

ways. I think that having classes where people from different disciplines come together could actually be really effective.

Of course, we already have classes with Planning and Architecture students together, especially at the graduate level, not that many of them, but there are some.

So just transmitting or conveying what our courses are about to other departments and just simply emailing another department telling them, “This is what we’re teaching.” And it’s actually amazing how much interest people show. So I think doing more of that and getting people in other departments to come to take our courses, would be really great.

EG: Yeah. I think even for reviews too, I know for the Ecological Practices Technical Methods course last semester, we were trying to get art professors to come in.

JH: I think faculty have been doing this all along. It just really depends on which studio you’re in and which courses you’re in.

How to be more forward-thinking in that, I think, is something that we probably should be talking about more as a department. As Kory mentioned, I think individual faculty or faculty groups are really pushed toward working with different disciplines. I work with a lot of biologists and ecologists in my work, but I think in terms of the structure of the university is really hard to actually get that to happen.

I tried co-teaching a class with a biologist a few years ago. It was difficult because, in essence, she was co-teaching it with me but kind of as a service because she wasn’t getting teaching credit for it. So there was just the kind of administrative structure to

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figure out how to get that to happen as well.

EG: Do you think it’s harder because we’re separated between campuses? Or do you think that doesn’t really have as much of an effect?

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KS: In my experience, if the topic is engaging enough, people will drive. It doesn’t seem to matter. And I have a number of colleagues that we go back and forth because the work is hard and the work is fun, and the work is interesting, and that will happen.

DH: I have a great appreciation for our location in a historic building and our position on the urban campus, and we can’t let a separation by distance stop us from collaborating with other departments. Plus, it’s exciting to see schools and departments shifting their locations on the UB campuses. This type

“how can we build more bridges between student educational experiences and faculty research . . . where there’s a reciprocity between students and faculty members.”

- korydon smith

of change happens slowly, but it can also make us aware of new opportunities for partnerships.

KS: But how to get that to take place in student life and educational opportunities for students... I mean, in some ways, what

we have to solve first is not how to give students interdisciplinary things. I think you get that as an undergraduate, actually, because that’s part in general education, and you get that somewhat as a graduate student. How we can build more bridges between student educational experiences and faculty research, in a way where student work is informing faculty research and faculty research is informing students.

KS: Yeah.

So that bridge is stronger in certain places and some faculty focus on that, and in other cases, it’s a bit more tenuous.

And figuring out how to give more students those types of really deep, meaningful experiences that are not only interdisciplinary but where there’s a reciprocity between students and faculty members, is the question.

JH: Linger. [chuckle]

EG: Yeah, it’s super interesting. I remember last spring with the tenure track student talks, the students and faculty candidates thought it was great that they were able to sit and talk with each other. And the same kind of thing happened with these discussions, where everyone was like, “Why don’t we do this more often?”

JH: That’s an interesting point, because I wonder if it’s more a condition of the time, meaning today, 2020, because I definitely don’t remember my life being so structured, time-wise, even just ten years ago. And I don’t know if it has to do with now being an administrator, although I think this was happening even before that, it seems like everything is sort of scheduled. Like Kory has to go in five minutes. [chuckle] But whereas before, when I was a student, both as an undergrad and graduate student, it seemed like there was just a lot of times when you would just sort of run into professors or faculty and students in a kind of informal setting. And people would sit and talk for an hour.

JH: And that rarely happens now.

KS: Yeah, I remember as a student, studio didn’t seem to have an end time. I would frequently actually prefer to be the last student that the faculty member would come to because then we could just talk for an hour.

KS: And it was about not only the work on the table but like the big questions.

JH: Right, right.

EG: Not to make it too architectural, but I wonder if it’s just a lack of that space that’s available? I know the atrium is an attempt to do that. I see students working there all the time, but I don’t see it as a gathering space unless there’s an event.

JH: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there is a kind of architectural question about it.

KS: This is part of the Crosby renovation.

Because we’re trying to solve this in the context of the studio building, because that building doesn’t have public space for that to happen.

EG: That’s really interesting.

JH: I mean, I think there is a kind of architectural component to it because when you have a studio, at least from my experience, and when I was in school, I was always in an open studio situation, it was never in separate rooms. And generally, people would feel free to just kind of stop and talk to people at their desks. It didn’t matter who it was, faculty or student. So I would be sitting at my desk, and somebody would walk by, another

faculty or whatever, and just stand around and talk for a while.

Or I would walk by someone’s desk, and stand and talk for half an hour about their project or about something else, and that was more the norm than the exception.

That was normal. That is something I don’t really see happening here.

DH: In some ways, we are still figuring out how to occupy the renovated spaces in Hayes Hall. And this generation of students uses studio space in different ways than we have seen in the past.

Of course, the hope is to provide a collaborative work environment for students in studio courses.

KS: Well, in my previous institution, I was at the University of Arkansas, and we had a couple of studios there that were more open studios. We were in the former library building. So there was a big reading room, and that was one of the major studios. There was a renovation that was done. We were displaced, and we went to the original gymnasium for the university. And so every single student, all five years’ worth of students, were all on the gym floor. And it was the best. [chuckle] I mean, for all of these reasons. And there were a number of people who were apprehensive about it. They thought, “Oh my God, we’re going to have theft, and we’re going to...” All of those statistics about security and safety went down, and it was a great learning environment. It was great for the first-year students because they could see everything that was going on, and likewise for the people in the upper divisions, just the kind of student life that was created. And during studio hours, when you’ve got hundreds of people all in the same room, the life of the place.

And then when you went in on the weekend to do work, you knew there was going to be other people there as well.

You weren’t in some cloistered space where there were normally 12 people, and then nobody else shows up except you. And so just the openness to be able to see what was going on, and enter into a conversation easily without feeling like you have to open the door, and then you’re interjecting in some space and conversation that you’re not really meant to be a part of. I think to further echo Joyce’s point and yours, I think there is something architectural to the issue. Yeah.

There always is.

MODERATOR ELIZABETH GILMAN: MArch Student, Fred Wallace Brunkow Fellow (2019 - 2020), Editor PARTICIPANTS DANIEL HESS: Professor and Chair - Department of Urban and Regional Planning JOYCE HWANG: Professor and Associate Chair Department of Architecture KORYDON SMITH: Professor and Chair Department of Architecture

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School of architecture + planning ROBERT SHIBLEY, Professor and Dean - School of Architecture and Planning KORYDON SMITH, Professor and Chair – Department of Architecture DANIEL HESS, Professor and Chair – Department of Urban and Regional Planning JOYCE HWANG, Professor and Associate Chair – Department of Architecture

Staff Marion Brush, Barbara Carlson, Teresa Bosch De Celis, Brian Conley, Holly Cook, Darren Cotton, Patricia Donhauser, Kevin Donovan, Erin Edson, Debra Eggebrecht, Sharon Entress, Norma Everett, Christina Farrell, Wade Georgi, Enjoli Hall, Jason Hatfield, Matthew Hervan, Bradshaw Hovey, Hope Isom, Christy Krawczyk, Jeffrey Kujawa, Jason Kulaszewski, Danise Levine, Bruce Majkowski, Subbiah Mantharam, Douglas McCallum, R.J. Multari, Jessica Naish, Rose Orcutt, Chiwuike Owunwanne, Lynn Peperone, Brittany Perez, Paul Ray, Bartholomew Roberts, Lindsay Romano, Maryanne Schultz, Brendan Seney, Samantha Stricklin, Brenda Stynes, Heamchand Subryan, Monique Sulliivan-James, Rachel Teaman, Heather Warner, Jonathan White

faculty Craig Alexander, Seth Amman, Kimberly Amplement, So-Ra Baek, Paul Battaglia, Benjamin Bidell, Alex Bitterman, Jonathan Bleuer, Martha Bohm, Mitchell Bring, Nicholas Bruscia, Carl Calabrese, Brian Carter, Elaine Chow, Stephanie Cramer, Lauren Darcy, Stephanie Davidson, Charles Davis II, Gregory Delaney, Alan Dewart, Mustafa Faruki (2018-2019 Banham Fellow), Randy Fernando, Stephen P. Fitzmaurice, Mark Foerster, Kathryn Friedman, Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, Laura Garófalo-Khan, James Gottstine, Miguel Guitart, Zoe Hamstead, Hiroaki Hata, Melinda Hoffman, Christopher Hogan, Julia Jamrozik, Rachel Maloney Joyner, Kellena Kane, Bumjoon Kang, Omar Khan, Ashima Krishna, Emily Kutil (2019-2020 Banham Fellow), Annette LeCuyer, V. Jeffery LiPuma, Ann Lui, Margot Lystra, Kenneth MacKay, Dennis Maher, Jordana Maisel, Marguerite McAfee, Mark McGovern, Virginia Melnyk, William Murray, Noellan Niespodzinski, Erkin Özay, G. William Page, JiYoung Park, Ellen Parker, J. Cameron Parkin, Mary Perrelli, Eric Poniatowski, Alfred Price, Laura Quebral, Georg Rafailidis, Samina Raja, Nicholas Rajkovich, Molly Ranahan, Eric Recoon, Jeffrey Rehler, Christopher Romano, Annie Schentag, Laura Schmitz, Mark Shepard, Robert Silverman, Jin Young Song, Jon Spielman, David Stebbins, Hadas Steiner, Edward Steinfeld, Ernest Sternberg, Despina Stratigakos, Sara Svisco, Joseph Swerdlin, M. Beth Tauke, Henry Louis Taylor Jr., Kerry Traynor, Daniel Vrana, Bradley Wales, Adam Walters, Sue Weidemann, Margaret Winship, Li Yin

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