Using Its City as a Teaching Lab, a School Helps Rebuild It, Too

The aroma of baking Cheerios is drifting up from the Buffalo River as Kerry Traynor walks the bleak southern reaches of the Belt Line. Along with Robert Sozanski, one of her graduate students, Ms. Traynor crosses a wasteland under an elevated portion of Interstate 190 just south of downtown.

Once there was a dense network of industrial sidings here that was fed by the Belt Line, a 15-mile railroad loop around the city, and the two of them puzzle to identify remnants of brick loading platforms and stone bridge piers. Ms. Traynor, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning, decided to make the line the focus of her studio course this semester because city officials and developers were showing increased interest in it.

The commuters the loop once served are long gone, and only one freight customer remains, a plant that produces Milk-Bone dog biscuits. The Belt Line is, in a way, emblematic of the challenges and possibilities facing Buffalo.

The city’s population peaked around 1950, at 580,000, but then its importance as a transportation hub and manufacturing center began to fade. It now has less than half as many residents than it did 65 years ago. More than a quarter of its families live in poverty, and a 2010 count showed more than 20,000 vacant houses and apartments.

But where others might see post-industrial despair, the School of Architecture and Planning sees opportunities, both to help rebuild Buffalo and to use it as a teaching lab. Faculty members and students have been deeply involved in projects as modest as community gardens, as sweeping as regional economic-development plans, and as detailed as overhauling local building and zoning codes. Plenty of other colleges and universities work to help redevelop their communities, but few on anything like this scale or for as long.

The school’s applied-research undertakings have won praise from visiting accreditation teams (“you connect your research program to what architecture is all about — and that’s practice”) at the same time that they’ve helped improve Western New York’s economic outlook.

Some of the projects have been small and offbeat, like four students’ renovation of a crumbling 650-square-foot city house into a livable contemporary home. Others have been big, multiyear efforts, like a new medical district that it is bringing thousands of jobs into a city neighborhood.

The architecture school has also played a key role in civic efforts that revitalized the waterfront on Lake Erie, preserved the city’s extensive parks system, cleaned up the Buffalo River, and sought to protect the river’s iconic, towering grain elevators. The school’s 12-person research-and-policy arm, the UB Regional Institute, helped write a high-profile economic-development plan, called the Buffalo Billion, that attracted $1 billion from New York State. The school has also worked with local companies to improve their products and even created a Citizen Planning School to train people to be better advocates for all manner of projects they care about.

The architecture school’s local focus has also become a mainstay of its admissions outreach, with marketing materials trumpeting a learn-by-doing approach and noting that students’ “planning concepts become adopted plans” for neighborhoods and regions.

“Our research profile as a school of architecture and planning has gone up and up with a body of research that uses this region as its laboratory,” says the dean, Robert G. Shibley.

The City as Textbook

Ms. Traynor’s course this semester about the Belt Line is typical in that students are doing research on a timely topic and the city is the textbook. The students are touring and mapping the loop and studying structures associated with it, she says. What are the opportunities for interpretation? For intervention? By the end of the semester, they will have prepared potential design and development guidelines for the line.

The railroad that owns the Belt Line, CSX, has given no hint of abandoning it, so it’s not going to become Buffalo’s version of New York City’s High Line any time soon. But city officials hope that former industrial buildings along the tracks will attract developers of office or housing projects. (Already a six-story former factory overlooking the Belt Line has become trendy office space.) So the students’ guidelines could well have an impact.

If they don’t, the Belt Line will still have taught the students plenty about urban preservation and renewal. “The cheapest lab is the one that exists outside and around you,” says Mr. Shibley, who has been on the school’s faculty since 1982 and has been dean since 2011. He’s also partly responsible for the school’s Buffalo focus.

In 1990 he founded a predecessor to the Regional Institute and began producing one influential study after another, helping to cement the school’s reputation as a local planning powerhouse. Its best-known work may be “The Queen City Hub — A Regional Action Plan for Downtown Buffalo,” a 2003 report that envisioned the medical district and the revitalized lakefront.

“Every time someone says, You can’t do that,” Mr. Shibley says, “this city and our students and faculty members say, Yes, you can.”

As easy as he makes it sound, though, in practice it means he and others at the school have calendars cluttered with obligations quite unlike those of other scholars. They spend long hours at community meetings and stay up late to read planning documents filled with zoning and building-code minutiae. Successes depend on the web of relationships the school has built over the years, Mr. Shibley says, in part by being “the agent that doesn’t go home when the project is done.”

One of his first urban-design students, Doug Swift, has just opened RiverWorks, a sprawling complex on the Buffalo River just up from the General Mills plant that bakes Cheerios for the nation. RiverWorks includes two outdoor ice rinks, an indoor roller-derby track that doubles as a concert venue, a restaurant, and four bars. Still to come are a brewery in one former grain elevator and a beer garden in the remains of another.

Farther up the river is another business with close ties to the architecture school, Rigidized Metals, which sells specially textured metal sheets for indoor and outdoor use. Its latest catalog includes photos of a curved metal wall designed and built by two assistant professors of architecture, Christopher T. Romano and Nicholas Bruscia, and a recent graduate, Daniel J. Vrana, who is now a technician and adjunct instructor in their lab. They’ve been exploring new uses for the company’s products

Working with cardstock models and full-scale mock-ups in their campus lab, the team has found ways to add folds to the metal sheets and then assemble them into shapes that can be both structural and beautiful. The 20-foot-high curved wall pictured in the catalog stands near the Rigidized Metals office and supports itself with no structure other than a honeycomb of thin, folded plates — even though it gets buffeted by winds off the lake.

The company’s connection with the faculty members was “pretty loose” at first, a pair of studio courses that used the company as a teaching resource, says Mr. Romano. But it evolved into a research relationship in which the company began sponsoring some of the faculty members’ work and paying for their travel to conferences, in addition to giving them costly material to experiment with.

“We’re heavily invested in Buffalo,” he says. “We take advantage of what we have here — lots of space and lots of old buildings.”

Urban Food Policy

The School of Architecture and Planning enrolls about 650 students in undergraduate and graduate programs. Its approach, teaching the disciplines of architecture and planning together, has attracted faculty members like Samina Raja, an associate professor of urban and regional planning, who studies and teaches about urban food policy.

“Local governments and planners have overlooked the importance of food,” she says. “It’s not the thing planners think about for city revitalization.”

Buffalo has been an excellent lab for her work, she says, because many families here depend on public assistance to avoid hunger.

Ms. Raja was hired in 2001 to teach statistics but soon started working with a local organization called the Massachusetts Avenue Project, which teaches low-income children to become urban farmers and advocates for wider access to affordable, nutritious food. Later she organized an undergraduate course about community gardens, a class she says she set up to provide support to a citywide community-garden task force.

“We just figured we’d do a lot of reading,” says Derek Nichols, who was a student in the class and is now program manager at Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo, a nonprofit group. Instead the students produced, in one semester, a full plan for the task force.

The architecture school does still teach architecture, of course, but even that leads to unexpectedly Buffalonian results. Dennis M. Maher, an assistant professor of architecture, paid $10,000 for a West Side house that was all but falling apart. He began opening up walls and floors and adding what he calls “cityscape-like vignettes of architectural details” — some as small as dollhouses, others filling rooms and flowing between floors. The house became a gallery and teaching space for his studio courses, in addition to being his home. Now he’s bought a former church that he intends to make into a showcase for artisans and craftspeople “to advance the building arts in Buffalo.”

Gail V. Wells, a retired director of student life at Buffalo State College, is working to make a showcase her neighborhood, thanks in part to the architecture school’s two-year-old Citizen Planning School. Created as part of One Region Forward, a multiyear planning effort by Erie and Niagara Counties and the Cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, the program trains residents in advocacy through a series of Saturday-morning panel discussions and lectures by the school’s faculty and staff members. In 2014, 200 people took part; this year 120 did.

Ms. Wells was among several participants who developed specific ideas for their neighborhoods — in her case, a plan to upgrade a small park on Michigan Street that has a monument to Jesse Clipper, a musician who was the first black resident of Buffalo to die as a result of military service in World War I. The planning school “reminded me of the power of the people,” Ms. Wells says. “Grass-roots movements are at the heart of political change in America.”

Sometimes, of course, plans take a while to germinate, as has been the case with a landmark asylum complex designed in 1870 by the architect H.H. Richardson and empty for decades. “We kept ideas flowing for 30 years,” says Mr. Shibley, and now the complex is being renovated to house a hotel, a conference facility, and the Buffalo Architecture Center. Meanwhile, the dean is among those trying to come up with a new use for Buffalo’s other big white elephant, the 1929 Buffalo Central Terminal, which pairs a 17-story Art Deco office tower with enormous train concourses and other buildings.

“We keep drawing it,” says Mr. Shibley. “We keep the conversation going.”

Other projects the school has helped with are, by now, far along. Howard A. Zemsky is commissioner of the state’s Department of Economic Development and president of Empire State Development, the state’s economic-development agency, but he started working with Mr. Shibley’s research group more than a dozen years ago on the Larkin District, a project to create a mixed-use neighborhood in one of Buffalo’s earliest industrial areas.

“They helped us with figuring out a vision and prioritizing the many important tasks ahead of us,” Mr. Zemsky says. The project became such a success that a few years ago he had to go back to the school and meet with the same researchers to update the plan because, he says, “we had accomplished so much of what we originally laid out.”

While Mr. Zemsky was a co-chair of the Western New York Regional Economic Development Council — along with the university’s president, Satish K. Tripathi — it turned to the architecture-and-planning school for help when Governor Andrew M. Cuomo set up the competition in which Western New York eventually won $1 billion.

“One of our real competitive advantages was the expertise of the whole team at the UB Regional Institute,” says Mr. Zemsky, calling them “the go-to experts on sensible regional and urban planning.”

It’s a nice reputation to have, and Buffalo is indeed “beginning to see the clear light of day,” Mr. Shibley says. But knows there’s still plenty to do. “The pitch,” he says, “is always about a place becoming.”

Correction, Clarification (11/12/2015, 7:15 a.m.): This article originally misstated the School of Architecture and Planning’s enrollment as just over 500. It is actually 650. The article has been updated to reflect the correction and to clarify that the organization Dean Shibley founded in 1990 was not the current Regional Institute but one of its two predecessors.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.