Winning Team Selected in the University at Buffalo鈥檚 Resilient Campus Design Competition
The University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning has selected the聽winner of The Resilient Campus, an international design competition. The final team submissions were showcased in an exhibition at Crosby Hall on UB’s South Campus before traveling to the Aedes architecture gallery in Berlin. The upcoming fall symposium at UB will critique the work through different disciplinary frameworks 鈥 considering climate change, biodiversity loss and human vulnerability, and how these design strategies can be replicable across all scales of the built environment.
The team of LTL Architects + Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects + Derive Engineers was awarded first place. Stoss Landscape Urbanism + H枚weler Yoon Architecture placed second and MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio + Second Nature Ecology + Design placed third. MVRDV + RIOS received an honorable mention for their experimental visualizations.
鈥淚 extend my sincere gratitude to all of the teams for the creativity and intelligence they brought to this competition,鈥 says Julia Czerniak, competition coordinator and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. 鈥淭he entries represent remarkable use of new building materials, strategies for carbon reduction, prioritization of biodiversity, use of innovative visualizations and even the development of new tools 鈥 all guided by knowledge of UB鈥檚 South Campus, our city and region. Using UB as a test site, this work truly advances designing for resilience.鈥
聽launched in August of last year, with seven teams selected to compete and focus on two scales: campus and building. At the campus scale, teams had to develop and apply strategies for an ecologically robust, resilient landscape for UB鈥檚 South Campus. At the building scale, teams developed and applied an adaptive strategy for a portion of the existing Health Sciences Complex and a schematic approach to a university-assisted public school.
鈥淭he winning project, 鈥楩ield Studies: Growing a Biogenic Campus,鈥 reimagines South Campus as a productive landscape shaped by geothermal wells, productive forests and buildings grown from biogenic construction materials,鈥 says Charles Waldheim, chair of the competition jury and professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. 鈥淭heir proposal conceives of campus resilience through circular economies of plant materials and their infrastructures shaping a robust public forest landscape.鈥
Stoss Landscape Urbanism + H枚weler Yoon Architecture鈥檚 proposal, 鈥淐ampus Entanglements: Protocols for Learning,鈥 presented an atlas of landscape and architectural types to guide the long-term transformation of the South Campus, earning them second place, explains Jason Sowell, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning and the competition adviser.
The third-place proposal, 鈥淥ur Future is a Forest,鈥 developed by MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio + Second Nature Ecology + Design, reimagined the campus through afforestation, positioning a renewed forest landscape as both ecological infrastructure and an expanded educational resource for human and nonhuman communities.
The competing teams and their faculty liaisons and student assistants included:
- STOSS Landscape Urbanism + H枚weler Yoon Architecture
Faculty Liaison: Maia Peck
Student Assistants: Janice Ng, Edwin Sanchez Rodriguez, Ethan Ikegami - OBRA Architects + LOLA Landscape Architects
Faculty Liaison: Jon Spielman
Student Assistants: Ryan Bingham, Ben Jellinick - MVRDV + RIOS
Faculty Liaison: Randy Fernando
Student Assistants: Lydia Diboun, Kaya Jost, Gianni Rinaudo - MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio + Second Nature Ecology and Design
Faculty Liaisons: Joyce Hwang, Hiro Hata
Student Assistants: Ryan Mellen, Ashley Johnson, Will Sundell - LTL Architects + Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects + Derive Engineers
Faculty Liaisons: Kristine Stiphany, Nick Bruscia
Student Assistants: Berkan Sari, Gennaro Rovello, Allison Lavis, Shruti Kunadia - Barkow Leibinger + TOPOTEK1 + Transsolar KlimaEngineering + Guy Nordenson and Associates
Faculty Liaisons: Martha Bohm, Mohamed Aly Etman
Student Assistants: Danny Escandon, Jamie Jiang, Sukriti Sharma - ASPECT Studios + Woods Bagot Architecture + Dr. Jillian Walliss
Faculty Liaison: Elaine Chow
Student Assistants: Alec Pitillo, Ester Rafailova, Daniel Syperski