The Wow Factor -- School of Architecture and Planning 'Atelier' Opens

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- New and exciting ideas about our built surroundings will be on exhibition this week when the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning presents its annual Atelier, an extensive exhibition of work produced during year by the undergraduate and graduate students in architecture and planning studios.

The bulk of the exhibitions will be available for public viewing on March 30 from 7-9 p.m. in Hayes and Crosby halls on the UB South (Main Street) Campus. There is no admission fee.

The Atelier will also be open March 31 in Crosby Hall for onsite tours for prospective students beginning at 1:30 p.m.

In addition, there will be two free public exhibits of student work in the UB Art Galleries: "Buffalo Scaled" and the upcoming "Responsive Architecture" on April 4. A related exhibition in the Hayes Hall Lobby Gallery, running through April 4-13, features two student-built constructions created around sketches and drawings of plans by Louis I. Kahn, the greatest architect of the last half century.

"Buffalo Scaled," March 31-April 15 will present work produced in a freshman architecture studio that called upon students to use the Buffalo and Erie County telephone directory to physically construct city residences and businesses. The result is a group of architectural models that form a compressed version of the city and its surroundings.

"Buffalo Scaled" will open with a public reception at 6 p.m. March 31 and run through April 15 in the UB Anderson Gallery, One Martha Jackson Place (off Englewood Ave. near Kenmore Ave.). Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.

Exhibitors are students who were in a studio course taught by Beth Tauke, associate professor, and Michael Zebrowski, adjunct instructor, both in the Department of Architecture.

"Responsive Architecture," which runs April 4-April 15 in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus, will offer a fascinating glimpse into the future, showing us ways in which new computational technologies embedded in our environments and artifacts can permit us to interact with our surroundings automatically on an astonishing variety of levels.

Exhibits were produced by dual degree graduate candidates in architecture and media study and offer proposals for design strategies and tactics for an age of responsive environments and smart materials.

The UB Art Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Thursday to 7 p.m.

The exhibitors were students in three graduate classes: "Sense Space," a seminar taught by Omar Khan, assistant professor of architecture; "Databodies and Sentient Spaces," conducted by Mark Shepard, assistant professor of media study and architecture, and "Physical Computing," also taught by Shepard, which investigates the creative possibilities of integrating computational technologies into the physical world.

Visitors will see such exhibits as "Personal Sphere," which uses an ultrasonic proximity sensor to visualize an individual's own personal space, and "Social Box," an object that can read the proximity of a person moving in its environment and react to it, suggesting how in other contexts their spatial location can trigger programmed changes in an individual's surroundings.

The Atelier exhibition based on Kahn's works features drawings and plans for his Tribune Review Building in Greenberg, Pennsylvania, completed in 1962. They were given to the UB School of Architecture and Planning by William S. Huff, emeritus professor of architecture, who worked for Kahn between 1958 and 1962.

Isamu Noguchi, distinguished Japanese-American artist, sculptor, furniture designer and landscape architecture, called Kahn "a philosopher among architects." His work was preoccupied with the tectonic and the phenomenological, and he was said to have infused the simple, geometric "International Style" of architecture with a "poetry of light." Kahn died in 1974 at the height of his reputation, leaving behind a number of important buildings, including the First Unitarian Church in Rochester and the Salk Institute, as well as significant unbuilt projects.

The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Special Collections of the University Libraries.