Peter Reyner Banham

The Banham Fellowship in the Department of Architecture is intended to support design work that situates architecture within the general field of socio-cultural and material critique.

Peter Reyner Banham.

Peter Reyner Banham taught at UB from 1976-1980 and left an important legacy in experimental architectural criticism.

The fellowship honors the legacy of Peter Reyner Banham, who taught at UB from 1976-80 and produced a foundational body of scholarship on material/visual culture as a reflection of contemporary social life. Banham 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.

In celebration of Banham's legacy of experimental criticism, this fellowship supports the research and creative activity of emerging practitioners. Over the course of a year, fellows teach, deliver a public lecture and prepare an exhibition culminating from their research and creative work at the school.

2023-24 Banham Fellow: Kearon Roy Taylor

Kearon Roy Taylor.

Roy Taylor is an architectural designer, educator, and organizer joining us from Toronto, ON, where they serve as Associate Partner of Lateral Office and lecturer at the University of Toronto Daniels.

Beginning with a critical mapping of Buffalo’s neighborhoods, Roy Taylor’s project ILLIQUID ASSETS will examine tactics and strategies of locating and fortifying sites of social reproduction against the tide of gentrification and financialization gripping the contemporary late-capitalist city.

Roy Taylor’s past work with Lateral Office engaged architecture’s territorial ambitions through both built work and exhibition, with multiple projects in collaboration with Inuit and First Nations communities across Canada’s North. As organizer and activist, Roy Taylor has served as co-steward of The Architecture Lobby’s Tkaronto chapter, where they were engaged in the creation of the collaborative mapping project countermap.land for documenting racist and colonial spaces in “Canada.”

Roy Taylor also coincidentally shares a birthday with the namesake of the Fellowship.

Previous Fellows