Place Value

When it launches in June, the inaugural Medina Triennial is expected to draw some 50,000 visitors to the rural village of Medina, situated between Buffalo and Rochester on the Erie Canal.

The event will feature more than 50 works of contemporary art by local, national and international artists, on display in a dozen venues. But the first stop for most people will likely be the Medina Triennial Hub, an eye-catching education and welcome center occupying part of a historic 150-year-old building in the center of the village. The Hub opened last fall to serve as a formal launch for the Triennial.

Dozens of students and faculty members from UB’s School of Architecture and Planning came together during the spring 2025 semester to design the Hub and the furniture inside, largely through an independent study led by faculty members Maia Peck and Gregory Serweta, BS ’06 (co-partners of the design practice Serweta Peck). They were joined in the summer by other faculty and staff from the school’s Fabrication Workshop and a team of volunteers.

Designing the space was a true labor of love, the participants say, with its custom-designed furniture made from reclaimed and upcycled materials. These “Objects of Affection,” as the project came to be named, both invoke and embody the event’s deep sense of place.

Pieces include tiered seating made from 17-foot blocks of salvaged lumber, donated by the New York State Canal Corporation, that were used to construct the locks for the Erie Canal. The team also fashioned chairs from upcycled cardboard tubes, constructed a table with scrap lumber and boards left from a previous architecture exhibition, and plucked metal legs from the trash to bend into new life as stools.

Using two-by-fours found in the basement of Hayes Hall, they built a long, L-shaped bar to serve as a welcome desk, clad with more salvaged white oak from the canal.

A series of artist talks, workshops and panels at the Hub leading up to the Triennial is allowing visitors to engage with the event’s conceptual framework, which reimagines how contemporary art fits into rural, small-town geographies.

Noting the “genius loci” that guided the work, Serweta and Peck say the experience was a valuable learning process for all involved. Working with old or discarded elements—items that would be rejected in a typical design-build project—required not just planning but also openness to their true nature.

“We let the materials speak to us,” says Peck.

Work for the Medina Triennial Hub was sponsored by the Sydney Gross Memorial Fund, named for the UB architecture student who died in a car accident in 2009. The fund previously provided support to a student-designed memorial project in Medina led by architecture professor Joyce Hwang, a member of the Medina Triennial’s steering committee and board, and assistant professor Christopher Romano.