Events

It has been 15 years since the Small Built Works Project—a practical design-and-build workshop taught by architect Brad Wales for UB’s School of Architecture and Planning—first began making little marks throughout the city. Firs, in 2001, came a series of elegant bus shelters in Allentown; bike racks followed, and in following years the works have been not so small at all. (For example, the three projection towers in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s Front Yard.) One class built a granite monument to Frederick Law Olmsted; another renovated El Museo gallery on Allen Street.

This year the project returns to a neighborhood scale, with the Buffalo Benches Project: 23 benches designed for Buffalo’s First Ward neighborhood. (For the proposed locations, scroll down to the map below.) Sixteen students undertook designs that would be practical and beautiful, taking inspiration from the neighborhood in which they would be situated, and then negotiated the processes entailed in getting the benches permitted, built, and installed. Not an easy task nowadays, when municipalities are wont to remove benches rather than make new ones. But, according to the students and to Wales, the City of Buffalo has been helpful in shepherding the project along, and the Old First Ward Community Center has provided a viable liaison with neighborhood residents and stakeholders. To 

All this must be accomplished before this current semester ends. To accomplish a project like this, start to finish, in so short a time frame teaches the students to be professional, to work hard, and to enlist support. “We have to be highly competent and bring the fun,” Wales says of his students’ work.  

Donations of materials, work, and funds have brought the project close to fruition; further funding is needed to finish the project and to provide a fund for long-term maintenance of the benches.

You can learn more about the Buffalo Benches Project tonight, Wednesday, April 13 at 7pm at the Old First Ward Community Center (62 Republic Street), where the students will offer a public presentation on the project.