The Resilient Campus

The Resilient Campus

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. 

The impacts of climate change and its attendant crises are reshaping the way we design, inhabit, and sustain our built environment and the living landscape systems that support it. Within the context of a planetary polycrisis—the cascading, systemic, and interconnected risks and impacts posed by climate change (global heating), biodiversity loss (extinction) and human vulnerability (suffering) – traditional, disciplinary-based approaches and design practices have limited value. Universities, as hubs of innovation and experimentation, are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in both catalyzing and fostering the evolution of new resilient landscapes and buildings—and designers can help to envision them. We must think beyond our current approaches and conventions to move from best to next practices in our fields that will advance diverse and integrated strategies across all scales of the built and living environment. The path toward a resilient future requires constructing a complex synergy: through what we knew, what we now know, and what we imagine; through new and novel collaborations; and through thoughtful recovery and modification of what we already have. 

The challenge foregrounds resilience and sustainability—both crucial for long-term well-being—as related but distinct concepts that focus on different aspects of a living system's ability to thrive and to flourish. Resilience refers to a complex socio-ecological system's ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from—and, if necessary, transform in the wake of—shocks and disturbances. Sustainability, a topic of focus for decades and seen here as a prerequisite for resilience in the face of climate change, focuses on meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own.

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.

Charge

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.

Full Competition Details Here