2024-25 Banham Fellow Tiffany Xu explores construction through lens of contemporary fiction

As the Banham Fellow, Xu will engage students through a graduate seminar and studio and conclude her research project with an exhibition in the Spring.

Honoring Peter Reyner Banham’s legacy in experimental criticism, the fellowship in UB’s Department of Architecture supports emerging practitioners whose work situates architecture within the field of sociocultural and material critique.

Banham taught at UB from 1976-80 and produced a foundational body of scholarship on material and visual culture as a reflection of contemporary social life. He spent his time in Buffalo engaged in a scholarly project on the imaginary of American industrial architecture at work in early modernism that took the form of historical research, hands-on engagement, and seminar instruction, resulting in his landmark work, A Concrete Atlantis.

A graduate of UC Berkeley and Rice Architecture, where she was co-editor of PLAT Journal and received the William D. Darden Thesis Award, Xu operates at the intersection of making and critical inquiry.

At UB, Xu will probe contemporary construction with a two-part pedagogical project. Her Fall 2024 seminar invites students to explore architectural framing traditions and finish materials and applications. Moving from surface to substrate of buildings, students will consider the structural, tactile, and perceptual effects of materiality and making. Culture and context will take precedence over form through studies of conventions in application, ecological provenance, and tectonics. 

A Spring studio will direct students to the source of their context – contemporary short stories.

“Unlike the traditional project prompt, the story adds specific emotional qualities rather than sociological categories,” Xu says. “With a work of narrative fiction as a point of departure, one gains intimacy with a subject’s desires, challenges, fears and aspirations, which shifts the designer’s attention from exterior projection to interior life and opens new avenues for contemplating design interventions.” 

“The lens of fiction allows for engagement with worlds that might be foreign to one’s own,” Xu continues. “Because buildings do not consist of their physical components in isolation–they are entwined with living inhabitants and their personal narratives and routines–the designer has the responsibility to gain competency in modes of thinking outside of form and space.”

Adds Xu: “This approach is in the spirit of Peter Reyner Banham’s writings and projects that are rooted in lived experience and site-specificity.”

The search committee for this fellowship consisted of UB architecture faculty members Joyce Hwang and Jin Young Song and 2023-24 Banham Fellow Kearon Roy Taylor. “We were drawn to Tiffany’s proposal to explore building materials and systems of construction in novel ways, while also considering representational strategies including working through contemporary fiction,” says Hwang. “Her portfolio of both speculative and realized design work – in addition to her professional experience – demonstrates incredible promise as an emerging creative practitioner and design scholar. We are thrilled to welcome Tiffany to Buffalo.”

As she dives into the work, Xu says Buffalo’s internationally regarded architectural legacy and UB’s intensive engagement with its urban and material context inspired her to seek the Banham Fellowship. 

“I have heard much about UB's making-oriented approach and supportive intellectual environment, and I am looking forward to getting to know the School and city of Buffalo,” says Xu. “It's exciting to be joining an institution that has such a special connection to industrial production and American Architectural Modernism. Having grown up in California, Reyner Banham’s research and writings on Los Angeles—unorthodox in tone but rigorous in investigation—made a great impression on me. It's an honor to work in the context of his contributions to the discipline.”