Award-Winning U.S. Architecture Firms to Present Panel

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning will present a panel discussion on March 17 featuring Craig Borum and Ken Daubmann of the collaborative firm of PLY Architecture.

They will be joined by Vincent James, a principal of the architectural firm VJAA, and by David Miller, a principal of Miller Hull Partnership, LLD.

The panel presentation by these national award-winning architects will take place at 1:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall on the UB South (Main Street) Campus and will be followed by a reception for the speakers

The event will be free and open to the public.

PLY Architecture of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is actively engaged in design, materials research and fabrication. It received the 2005 AIA Michigan Design Honor Award for its collaborative work with Tiseo Architects, Inc. and the firm, the PEG Office of Landscape and Architecture, for Detroit's Mies van der Rohe Plaza, a stunning space marked by a rich conceptual landscape of fissures filled with a subtle palette of plant materials.

The firm also recently received an award for their design of the Big Ten Burrito restaurant in Ann Arbor, in which the interior of the small restaurant is created through the use of an inexpensive and prosaic material dematerialized to alter the viewer's perception and experience. This is accomplished by the interplay of decorative plywood panels that define two separate areas, against a backdrop of rich red walls, floor and ceiling.

VJAA is an architectural practice based in Minneapolis that produces innovative, high-quality buildings through the synthesis of research and design. Among them, the Charles Hostler Student Center at the University of Beirut and the University of Cincinnati Gate House, both of which won 2006 Progressive Architecture Awards.

It has won many other awards as well for work published in Architecture, Architectural Record, Architecture Review (UK), A+U (Japan), The New York Times, Perspecta, and Praxis and in a number of books in the U.S. and in France, Germany and Spain, and is the subject of   a monograph recently published by Princeton Architectural Press. In 2001, the firm also received the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  

The Miller Hull firm's buildings focus on sustainability. Winners of the AIA Architecture Firm Award, they received a National AIA Award for housing in Chicago in 2007 and many, many other awards for architectural achievement.

The firm always has specialized in environmentally sensitive buildings, beginning with many award-winning earth-sheltered and solar designs in the early 1980's. Its principals hold that sustainable development solutions create both economic and environmental value. "In this sense," they say, "we are similar to the 'total quality' movement, which proved that it is possible to improve quality and reduce costs, in other words, achieve the seemingly impossible."