Contributed By: Courtney Creenan, M.Arch + M.UP Student

Getting inside Buffalo, New York’s grain elevators has been on many a University at Buffalo architecture student’s to-do list.  This past fall, students in the Inclusive Design Research Group were able to not only tour the facilities, but work inside the Marine A Grain Elevator, which is now a part of the newly incorporated Silo City complex. 

The studio focused on a topic often overlooked in the architecture field: the public bathroom.  Students had to design innovative, responsible, inclusive, and clever responses to potential event spaces proposed along with their public bathroom design.  Some projects challenged current bathroom practices and stigmas.  Others integrated the event space programming into the bathroom to create more atmospheric experiences than normally found in a typical bathroom through the use of repurposed materials, lighting affects, and acoustics. 

Although many projects were very detailed in their proposal drawings, one pair of students, Patrick Connolly and Todd Graci, actually constructed their bathroom on site and it is now a working composting toilet for future events.  The two bought a shipping container and retrofitted it with three bathrooms.  This is the first design installation in the Silo City complex. Below are images from the students’ final presentations at the end of the Fall 2011 semester.

To view photo credits, select image thumbnail below.

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Partition Transformation

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This past fall semester, 13 students embarked on an explorative journey in the world of furniture design and construction with Materials and Methods Shop Director Dick Yencer and his assistant Wade Georgi.  Throughout the semester, students were instructed on how to properly use various... View full entry