UB’s international design competition selects winning team

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning has selected the winner for The Resilient Campus, an international design competition.

LTL Architects + Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects + Derive Engineers were awarded first place, followed by Stoss Landscape Urbanism + Höweler Yoon Architecture, and MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio + Second Nature Ecology and Design in second and third place, respectively. MVRDV + RIOS received an honorable mention for their experimental visualizations.

“I extend my sincere gratitude to all of the teams for the creativity and intelligence they brought to this competition,” said Julia Czerniak, competition coordinator and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning.

“The 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 — all guided by knowledge of UB’s South campus, our city and region. Using UB as a test site, this work truly advances designing for resilience.”

The Resilient Campus competition 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’s 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.

“The winning project, ‘Field Studies: Growing a Biogenic Campus,’ reimagines South Campus as a productive landscape shaped by geothermal wells, productive forests, and buildings grown from biogenic constructions materials,” said Charles Waldheim, chair of the competition jury and professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. “Their proposal conceives of campus resilience through circular economies of plant materials and their infrastructures shaping a robust public forest landscape.”

Stoss Landscape Urbanism + Höweler Yoon Architecture’s proposal, “Campus Entanglements: Protocols for Learning,” presented an atlas of landscape and architectural types to guide the long-term transformation of South Campus, earning them second place, explains Jason Sowell, associate professor in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning and the competition advisor.

Third-place proposal “Our Future is a Forest,” developed by MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio +Second Nature Ecology and Design, reimagined the campus through afforestation, positioning a renewed forest landscape as both ecological infrastructure and an expanded educational resource for human and non-human communities.

The final team submissions are currently showcased as an exhibition in 116 Crosby Hall on UB’s South Campus through March 13. The exhibition will travel in March to the Aedes architecture gallery in Berlin, followed by other international venues.

The upcoming fall symposium at UB will critique the work through different disciplinary frameworks — considering climate change, biodiversity loss and human vulnerability, and how these design strategies can be replicable across all scales of the built environment.