FENCE

Students:

Kwabena Adonu, John Henning, Alexander Johnson, Gartin Lin, Matt McLean, Gabrielle Morales, Matt Morales, Alex Perrino, Nicole Sarmiento, Catie Shadic, Nicholas Sturner, Robert Sullivan

Faculty:

Term:

Course:

Program:

Martha Bohm, Laura Lubniewski

Spring 2022

ARC606, Ecological Practices Graduate Research Group

MArch

What does it mean to build an edge condition? Architectural interventions can engage, filter, and connect people. They can also serve as an edge, or threshold to a boundary. Students in the Spring 2022 Ecological Practices Graduate Research Group studio tested active boundary systems in their local community through an interactive installation. The studio designed and fabricated a 150' linear edge between the site of an urban farm and a residential neighborhood in the Bailey Green community. Through creative means to embed itself within the neighborhood, an important goal was to facilitate policy change within the black urban farming community. Students were asked to see the designbuild project as something able to generate new geometries, porosity, and variability, hence “Fence+.” The project aggregates five 30’ wide lots, merging lot lines while identifying the five sections of the studio’s installation. As such, students teamed up to develop and build smaller parts of a larger whole that, upon their connection, created a coherent and site-specific logic of urban architecture. In collaboration with Buffalo Go Green and Bailey Green residents, students built each of the panels in the School’s Fabrication Workshop with the intent to install them on-site.

"A huge part of it was the community engagement aspect. We reached out to people in the neighborhood in an effort to get their input on how to design and what we should include on this fence to make it an addition they would value."

- Alexander Johnson

Along with the design-build process, this studio also took the ideals of how studio culture is defined and wrote their own principles on how to treat one another. Students and instructors outlined how their studio would function over the course of the semester. As a collective, the studio agreed to foster a constructive atmosphere during design reviews, engage in open dialogue daily, and make eye-level conversation the norm.

Prioritizing an environment that allows students to learn at their own pace, recognizing effort over “quality,” positioned a cooperative work environment for students and their instructors. By understanding how one another likes or needs to work, the studio became as much about providing a place of comfort as it was about completing a project.