With three different tracks, UB's nationally accredited Master of Architecture offers a path into the profession for students from any academic background. 

- Korydon Smith, professor and chair, architecture

As a community-minded, socially-conscious community of architects and designers, we ground our work in the communities we serve, here and around the world. Such a place-based approach to teaching and research generates spaces and places that reflect the values and aspirations of a community and responds to the context of a site, culturally, historically, ecologically. Our commitment to creating just and inclusive spaces for all shapes the projects and inquires we pursue, the stakeholders we engage, the spatial interventions we propose, and the methods we employ.   

Our community engagements run wide and deep, stretching across decades and around the world, from Buffalo, to Toronto, to Uganda, Costa Rica, and Seoul, and cities across the U.S. From housing for refugees on Buffalo's East Side to workforce training in the construction-related arts, to spatial analyses of agriculture in the Global South, we seek to understand, celebrate and reimagine place through innovative, community-informed design.

The center of our community-based approach is Buffalo, a resurgent post-industrial city that has situated and inspired our work for more than 50 years. Its dynamic urban landscapes are characterized by a dualism of prosperity and inequity - world-class architecture, vibrant neighborhoods, and stark pockets of poverty and underdevelopment. Meanwhile, our expanding spheres of influence and impact have taken us to new locales around the world to complex inequities in health, development, climate justice and food access. The Black Lives Matter movement has also brought new visibility and urgency to our work in some of Buffalo's most distressed neighborhoods and to paradigm-shifting critiques of architecture and its relationship to systemic racism. 

Drawing upon the School's founding as a center for experimental research and socially-conscious design, we approach architecture as a force of innovation and action upon the world's greatest challenges. This combination of speculative design inquiry rooted in communities and practice setting generates work that is both relevant and boundary-pushing.

The MArch program at UB is distinguished by its intensive focus on research linked to complex global problems. Students in our program have the option to focus their study through five curricular research groups that pool faculty expertise and host issue-driven studios. Our faculty are highly collaborative thinkers and practitioners with diverse connections to industy, community and eight transdisciplinary centers that tap the disciplinary depth of UB, the most comprehensive public research university in the Northeast. Through studios and independent research students engage directly with ongoing research in terra cotta facade development, fabrication with thin-guage metal, climate resilient design for Great Lakes cities, and design for health equity in the Global South.

The study of architecture at UB is distinctly hands on and on-the-ground. An enterprising community of makers and doers, our faculty and students bring a spirit of activism to work that directly engages the physical, social and natural world around us. Design-builds and in-the-field research are common endeavors in the Department of Architecture, from landscape installations among the grain silos of Buffalo, to exploring vernacular architectural solutions in a rural Indian village, to working directly with architectural manufactuers on the factory floor.

Students can push their design research into models, prototypes and full-scale builds in the Fabrication Workshop, the hub our our thinking-through-making curriculum. A fully equipped high bay space, our shop is among the largest of any architectural school in the U.S. Equipped for fabrication of all types, the shop serves both as a space to execute coursework and a think-tank and makerspace for research on materials and fabrication. Also in Parker Hall, the SMART Fabrication Factory is a state-of-the-art collaborative research space for industry-engaged inquiries in digital craft and the heart of UB's resarch on Sustainable Manufacturing and Advanced Robotic Technologies. Industry partners have included Boston Valley Terra Cotta, Rigidized Metals, CEMEX, SOM, CannonDesign and  and have generated internationally award-winning research on facade systems and fabrication methods.