About Competition
The Resilient Campus challenges architects, landscape architects, planners, and other allied design professionals to boldly envision the University at Buffalo’s South Campus—a public campus on its way to becoming carbon neutral—as a socio-ecologically integrated landscape that engages the pressing and intertwined challenges of climate change. As a forward-looking academic environment, its design should foster a resilient, adaptable, and inclusive setting that recognizes and integrates the interdependencies among its many constituencies and species, human and non-human.
Through imagining scenarios for campus landscapes and buildings, and more reciprocal relationships between the designed and the living environment, this competition—and ensuing traveling exhibition, public event, and publication— seeks to thoughtfully advance, widely disseminate, and purposely promote transdisciplinary and transformative knowledge on designing for resilience.
The competition charge focuses on two scales:
Campus Scale: Develop and apply strategies for an ecologically robust resilient landscape for South Campus, advancing its status as an intellectual, cultural, and social asset for its many constituents and surrounding communities.
Building Scale: This encompasses two interconnected challenges.
- Recognizing the complex spatial needs of the academic research enterprise, develop an adaptive strategy for a portion of the existing, underused Health Sciences Complex— through deconstruction, modification, and new construction—to accommodate various types of labs and collaborative spaces.
- Recognizing the broader public mission of the University, consider the inclusion of a University-Assisted Public School, which could be incorporated within/near the Health Sciences Complex, or elsewhere on the campus.
Like many other North American campuses of higher education, UB’s South Campus is subject to constant evolution to support teaching and research needs, reveal and celebrate its layered histories, and foster diverse academic communities. Although South Campus in its Great Lakes environs is not frequently, to date, vulnerable to extreme weather events, flooding, drought, and fire, it is a highly representative case of “the college campus”—an archetype of American urbanism. Addressing resilience and adaptability challenges systemically in this paradigmatic context will provide insights for rethinking campus environments at large.
Requirements / Eligibility
Format: Teams wishing to be considered for the competition must submit a digital document profiling their proposed team and design qualifications. It should convey the required information clearly and compellingly and demonstrate the team’s design approach.
Content: The Selection Committee will look for the following items. The materials should be organized in the specific order listed below:
Letter of Interest: The letter should describe the team’s interest in this project, citing relevant information about the challenges of designing for resilience based on the team’s design approach and experience. The letter should also address the team’s knowledge of technical factors such as sustainable design or innovative construction techniques.
Team Composition: The Primary Team must include both an architect and landscape architect. Teams may add other consultants as they see fit (planners, engineers, ecologists, lighting designers, graphic designers, etc.). Team members do not need to have worked together before but must demonstrate the ability to form a compatible, complementary partnership.
Team descriptions should provide an overview of the firms involved and how the team is organized, followed by a single-page resume or brief bio of each of the key individuals participating on the team. Be sure to cite each person’s respective expertise and anticipated responsibility on the project. Finally, provide the name of, email address, and phone number for the team’s Primary Contact Person.
The selected teams will be required to include a UB SAP faculty member/student team for local expertise and assistance in Stage Two. These groups will be assembled by the competition organizers, and their stipend will be provided by the sponsor. Teams will also be encouraged to consult with a local design practice; a list of firms and their contact person will be provided when the Stage Two Brief is issued.
To find more details & Register visit HERE
LAST DATE OF REGISTRATION: 26, September, 2025
LAST DATE OF SUBMISSION: 26, September, 2025
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