University at Buffalo Libraries

By SUE WUETCHER
Published May 16, 2013
UB Reporter

“The Environment” is the theme of the eighth edition of the UBThisSummer Lecture Series, the annual summer series of talks by prominent UB faculty members.

The lectures, which are free and open to the public, will begin at 4 p.m. most Wednesdays, beginning June 5 and running through Aug. 7, in Agrusa Auditorium on the first floor of Davis Hall, North Campus.

There will be no lecture on July 3.

The lectures will showcase UB’s ongoing research pertaining to the environment, with topics ranging from global warming to the Great Lakes. The series also will highlight how researchers representing strategic strengths of the UB 2020 strategic plan approach the theme of the environment.

The schedule:

June 5: “Clean Air: How It Benefits the Young & Old,” Alan Lockwood, emeritus professor, Department of Neurology, Strategic Strength in Health & Wellness Across the Lifespan. Drawing on landmark studies linking major types and sources of air pollution to the leading causes of death in America, Lockwood will argue that cleaner air will improve health, control rising health care costs, and attack state and federal debt.

June 12: “Extreme Events of the Environment: The Challenges of Understanding & Responding to Climate Change, Melting Glaciers, Sea Level Rise & Hurricanes,” Chris Renschler and Jason Briner, both associate professors, Department of Geography, Strategic Strength in Extreme Events: Mitigation and Response. Renschler and Briner will discuss the latest research in monitoring, modeling and managing changes to our environment, and the resilience of communities against related extreme events.

June 19: “After the Flood: The Political Environment of Latin American Culture,” Justin Read, associate professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Strategic Strength in Cultures & Texts. Read will introduce the concept of “ecocriticism” in a discussion of his current research on modern Latin American literature, showing how authors gave meaning to Argentina and Brazil’s new urban environment in the 19th and 20th centuries.

June 26: “How Climate Change Impacts Planning and Policymaking in WNY,” Himanshu Grover, assistant professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Strategic Strength in Civic Engagement & Public Policy. Although reliable data confirms the increasing rate of climate variability and change due to global warming, there remains a lack of attention to this issue in the field of environmental and development planning. Grover will discuss planning in the Buffalo-Niagara region and whether policymakers are sensitive to climate change and how it affects local decision-making.

July 10: “Sustaining UB: Creating Resiliency in the Face of Global Challenges,” Ryan McPherson, chief sustainability officer UB Office of Sustainability. McPherson will discuss UB’s model of “sustainability,” which focuses on finding solutions to global challenges through research, education, setting the bar high for sustainability in the university’s own operations and partnering with the external community.

July 17: “An Environmental Disaster & Its Consequences: Oxygenation of the Planet & Iron Metabolism,” Daniel Kosman, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Strategic Strength in Molecular Recognition in Biological Systems and Bioinformatics. Kosman will explore the chemical landscape of oxygen and Iron—the body’s single most important nutrient—and how iron also can pose a threat.

July 24: “The Great Lakes Futures Project: Toward a Sustainable Future for the Great Lakes,” Joseph Atkinson, director, Great Lakes Program, and professor, Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, and Kathryn Friedman, research associate professor of law and policy, UB Regional Institute, Strategic Strength in Civic Engagement and Public Policy. Atkinson and Friedman will look at the science and policy involved in a major bi-national initiative to ensure a sustainable future for the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin, and make a case for an integrated approach to better understanding—and ultimately solving—issues impacting the basin.

July 31: “Nanomaterials for Solar Energy Conversion,” David Watson, associate professor, Department of Chemistry, Strategic Strength in Integrated Nanostructured Systems. Watson will discuss the unique properties of nanometer-scale materials and how those properties might be exploited to dramatically increase the efficiency of solar-energy conversion.

Aug. 7: “Computing, Data and Volcanoes: Using Simulations and Data to Manage Risk,” Abani Patra, professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Strategic Strength in Information & Computing Technology. Patra will discuss UB’s pioneering research in computational modeling technology that drastically enhances the ability to plan for previously unforeseeable events such as volcanic eruptions.

for more information… Summer Lecture Series

By CHARLOTTE HSU
Published May 16, 2013
UB Reporter

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is bestowing a national award on an architecture education program that UB students, alumni and faculty help to run.

Called Architecture + Education, the initiative will receive the 2013 AIA Diversity Recognition Program award for introducing thousands of grade schoolers to architecture over the past 13 years.

Children in the program become tiny architects, blending imagination, art and science in projects that have included designing tree houses, a nature park for snakes and lions, dream bedrooms and a spaghetti tower playground. The goal is to help children develop an appreciation for the built environment, from individual buildings to public parks to whole cities.

Students and faculty from the UB School of Architecture and Planning contribute to the program by working with teachers and local architects to engage kids in learning activities in the Buffalo Public Schools (BPS). The program’s chair is Linsey Graff, a UB architecture graduate and an architectural planner in UB’s Capital Planning Group.
more…

MARK BYRNESMAY 07, 2013
The Atlantic Cities
Luminous Shots of Grain Elevators Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before

Buffalo is ready to put its long-neglected grain elevators back to use, this time in service of tourism.

The Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation just rolled out a four-stage plan to illuminate the grain elevators along the city’s waterfront. It’s an attempt to attract more visitors and, perhaps more importantly, to put to rest the negative association grain elevators have with Buffalo’s economic decline.

Despite acclaim from the likes of LeCorbusier and Reyner Banham, the grain elevator tends to be seen as burdens from the past by locals. This is beginning to changes though thanks to the emergence of Silo City, a project that has so far included art shows inside the old silos and the nationally acclaimed bee hive concept, “Elevator B.”

The ECHDC, already responsible for Canalside, a sweeping redevelopment of Buffalo’s inner harbor, is hoping to build off the momentum along the city’s waterfront by creating an attraction that’ll help reshape Buffalo’s image. “It will change how we see ourselves and where we live, and it will change how visitors from near and far see us again,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery director, Janne Siren told the Buffalo News.

Ambiences Design Production will be doing the illumination work. It has garnered acclaim for a similar project it developed in Quebec City, one which started off as a one-time event to commemorate the city’s 400th anniversary only to be so successful however, that it has since become an annual event. It’s now seen by the city as one of its most compelling tourist draws.

read more…

Professor Tauke is affiliated with the Center for Inclusive Design & Environmental Access (IDEA), the leading research center on inclusive design in the built environment in the U.S. where she studies sensory issues in the built environment. She is the co-founder and editor of Universal Design Education Online, the primary website for UD education. She co-edited Universal Design: New York with Dr. G. Scott Danford, and is currently working on two books– one on diversity in design and another on inclusive and sensory issues in housing. Professor Tauke’s talk will address the human body as an important site for design in the 21st century.

http://youtu.be/NrEEBWMo1Os

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MEDIACITIES 2013
International Conference, Workshops and Exhibition
Buffalo, New York, May 3-5, 2013
http://mediacities.net
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The fourth MediaCity reflects on pluralities and globalities, on MEDIACITIES everywhere.

What new lines of inquiry and emergent relations between urbanity and digital media are found in non-Western cities, in post-Capitalist cities, in cities hosting civic turbulence or crossing international boundaries? What urban-medial relations are taking shape differently in urban milieux that may have been heretofore overlooked? These cities are deserving of more attention than ever before, as sites of population growth, of new cultural and social formations, of new entanglements between urban life and contemporary media, communications and information technologies, and more. MEDIACITIES promises to expand our understanding of both media and the city today, and to articulate new sites of practice and working methods for an expanding field.

In addition to a conference program of panels selected from an international call for papers, MEDIACITIES will feature keynote speakers, including Benjamin H. Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Director of D:GP, The Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego; Mike Crang, Reader in Cultural Geography at Durham University in the UK; and Stephen Kovats, cultural and media researcher, formerly artistic director of transmediale, Berlin’s festival for art and digital culture, and international program curator at V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam.

MEDIACITIES will feature an exhibition of commissioned works that confront different aspects of the contemporary entanglements of digital media and urban life in cities around the world today – spaces of appearance, of exchange, and of identity. Artists in the exhibition include Paolo Cirio, Julian Oliver, Stephanie Rothenberg, and Antoine Schmidt.

MEDIACITIES workshops introduce skills and themes relevant to this year’s conference focus on multiplicities. Workshops include Interactive Planning Istanbul, examining the emergent ecologies of interaction between socio-economical relationships and the structure of a city using computational design tools; NeuroVision, exploring the urban aesthetics of spaces in Buffalo with artist Ursula Damm via a web-based sandbox for Generative Video Processing; Neo-provincialism, a knowledge-share workshop addressing the concept of neo-provincialism through connecting cybernetics and urban agriculture to their adjacent spatial and xeno-spatial implications; and Digital Media in Urban Spaces, mapping and visualizing urban digital media based on a methodology for empirical research using GPS and geo-tagging techniques.

for more information or to register: http://mediacities.net/

6mbs
Buffalo Rising

The Buffalo Architecture Foundation is inviting everyone to attend an event on Thursday at 6:00pm called “6 Minute Building Stories”. Guests will be treated to a series of six minute stories about planning, architecture and landscape, as seen through the eyes of co-presenters who, through use of photos, will paint a picture of our built environment and the effect that it has on different people.

Building Stories will give us an insight into the people who help to shape our city, while opening your eyes to a world that can sometimes be so obvious that it escapes us. The series is meant to be an eye-opener to our surroundings and the impact that the built environment has on all of us, in more than just utilitarian ways.

Thursday, Apr 25, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
The Greenhouse @ The Hotel Lafayette
391 Washington Street
Buffalo, NY 14203

To browse some Building Stories, please view the Buffalo Architecture Foundation Building Stories Collection.

The Buffalo Architecture Foundation Building Stories Collection is a cooperative venture of the UB Libraries and the Buffalo Architecture Foundation, Inc. (BAF). It features a celebration of Western New York’s architectural landscape; the digital collection includes text and images submitted by individuals interested in documenting and sharing their personal experiences with the region’s architecture, construction, landscape and planning.

Experience the country’s most accessible solar park!
5pm on Monday, April 22, 2013
UB Solar Strand, Flint Road, across from the Center for Tomorrow

Meet Buffalo Niagara’s “Sustainability Igniters”–our local leaders and innovators in environmental sustainability. There will be exhibits from local sustainability organizations, local food, music, prize giveaways, and much more!

Register at: http://www.buffalo.edu/sustainability/engagement/earth-week.html

Anne Lacaton – Clarkson Chair in Architecture
Anne Lacaton, French architect, born 2 August 1955 in Saint-Pardoux-la-Rivière in Dordogne. She graduated from the National School of Architecture of Bordeaux in 1980, and completed her studies with a Master of Urban Planning at the University of Bordeaux in 1984. Anne Lacaton and associate Jean-Philippe Vassal created the agency Lacaton & Vassal in 1989.

Interview from OnArchitecture: Anne Lacaton
http://www.onarchitecture.com/interviews/anne-lacaton

Books:
Lacaton & Vassal
APL Book Collections: NA 1053 .L24 L34 2006

Lacaton & Vassal
APL Book Collection: NA1053 .L19 A4 2009

2G Lacaton & Vassal: obra reciente = recent works
APL Book Collection: NA1053 .L3 A4 2011

Plus : la vivienda colectiva : territorio de excepción = les grands ensembles de logements : territoire d’exception = large-scale housing developments : an exceptional case
APL Book Collection: On order

Online publications at http://www.lacatonvassal.com/publications.php
The website features project descriptions and options to download article pdfs.

UB Course Reserve: Clarkson Chair Lecture Series – Anne Lacation
-Printed publications from lacatonvassal.com/publications

http://foodsystemsplanning.ap.buffalo.edu/index.php/ub-sustainability-film-series-to-screen-american-meat-3-10-2013/
Thursday, March 21, 2013
6:30pm

107 Capen Hall (Honors College Colloquium Room)

Can sustainable farming feed America?

Find out: don’t miss an upcoming screening of documentary film American Meat (www.americanmeatfilm.com) at 6:30pm on March 21st in 107 Capen Hall.

American Meat looks at cattle, hog, and chicken production in the U.S. Three core actionable principles guide American Meat’s nationwide Young Farmers Screening Series: thank America’s farmers; support young farmers; and food choices matter.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion including the filmmaker, Samina Raja (Associate Professor, UB School of Architecture and Planning), Jesse Meeder (Farm Director, Massachusetts Avenue Project), and Douglas Bunker (co-owner of Lake Country Premium Natural Meats).

All films in the Sustainability Film Series are free and open to the public.