Field Studies: Growing a Biogenic Campus
The Resilient Campus Competition challenged design teams to envision the University at Buffalo’s South Campus as a resilient, adaptable, and inclusive setting over a 50-year timeline. The winning proposal—co-led by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and LTL Architects with Derive Engineers—outlines a strategy for centering ecology and community while adapting to extreme weather, shifting demographics, and evolving educational paradigms.
Regenerative Relationships
In the face of climate extremes, the proposed Biogenic Campus evolves to meet the needs of students, faculty, staff, and community members while fostering a regenerative relationship to the city and its bioregion. The plan incorporates a broad set of inputs including IPCC and New York State Climate Impact Assessment data, student assessments of campus issues and needs, engineering data and analysis, and the University’s own carbon neutrality goals. This responsive framework adapts to extreme weather, transforming ecologies, shifting demographics, and evolving educational paradigms over the next half-century and beyond. The campus is conceived not as an exclusive enclave, but as a multi-species refuge and collective resource: capturing carbon, generating energy, growing biomaterials, and enlivening the community and ecosystem.
The Biogenic Campus plan embodies three primary principles for resiliency:
Interdependent Systems: Infrastructure, Architecture, and Landscape are intertwined—the landscape provides biomaterials for construction, ecosystems support geothermal infrastructure while sequestering carbon, gardens provide education and nutrition, and structure and landscape function as extensions of each other.
Biodiverse and Multivalent Landscapes: Ecological corridors structure networks of circulation and education; micro-climates provide a variety of social and educational spaces; precipitation is proactively managed; and adaptive management reduces maintenance and promotes ecosystem health.
Biogenic Architecture: The campus grows its architecture; site-grown, plant-based materials provide for the construction and renovation of buildings, reducing embodied carbon and increasing thermal performance.
2050
The climate is warmer and wetter, with an increase in lake-effect snow and severe precipitation. Winter temperatures have risen 5° since 2010 and days over 90° have increased.[i] Disruptions to the polar vortex cause extreme cold snaps and lake-effect snowfalls up to 54 inches. Intense seasonal droughts and climate volatility destabilize global agriculture.
The first phases of construction using biogenic systems are complete, deploying timber and agricultural materials harvested from UB campuses and regional fields. More ecologically diverse landscape-scale systems are implemented, monitored, and adaptively maintained.
The Oak Savanna and Ribbon Forest provide food and habitat for animals and address conservation priorities in the Lake Erie region. The Ribbon Forest provides shade, windbreaks, and recreation, while the Savanna accommodates geothermal wells and deep-rooted grasses that sequester carbon.
In the Geothermal Timber Forest, trees are nearing their first harvest cycle for the construction of the first phase of the University-Assisted Community School (UACS). The harvest rhythm keeps tree roots from invading geothermal wells, while also sequestering carbon in architectural form. The mass timber provides passively climatized shelter for classroom buildings and experimental gardens.
Driven by virtual classes and declining birth rates, the population of on-campus students decreases. The desire for community, however, has not waned. Continuing-Ed classes and events expand the UB population. Third spaces—recreational paths, lawns, community hubs, and the public clinic at the Health Sciences Complex (HSC)—become convening grounds for students and residents. The first Resilience Hub opens, supporting celebratory gathering and community care.
2080
Climate changes are severe: days over 90° increase to 90 per year; annual precipitation has increased by 17% with snow turning to heavy rain as temperatures increase. Severe droughts, collapse of insect populations, and a destabilized Gulf Stream lead to instability in agricultural systems.
The ecological strategies implemented on campus have made it a refuge from climatic shocks. The Savanna, Ribbon Forest, and wetlands mitigate temperatures and rain events. The Geothermal Timber Forest continues to sequester carbon while providing material for campus buildings.
Accessible green corridors, quads, flexible learning spaces and labs span buildings and landscape, accommodate evolving technologies and pedagogies, and promote interaction among students, faculty, and staff. The campus becomes a gradient of thermal environments; passively climatized spaces, passages and sheltering roofscapes.
More campus buildings become community Resilience Hubs. The UACS and HSC promote interaction between the University and Buffalonians via community gardens, spaces of care, and collective events. Intergenerational housing accommodates students and lifelong learners.
The campus integrates both high- and low-tech systems. A digital twin monitors buildings and site. Geothermal and rooftop solar fully support the campus. Renovated buildings optimize energy performance via biogenic insulation that reduces and sequesters carbon. By 2080, total carbon neutrality has been achieved.
Anticipating climatic and social uncertainty, the design envisions manifold, interdependent systems to ensure the campus can adapt to future extremes and provide an inclusive haven for the flourishing of learning, human connection, and interspecies sustenance. Multi-functional landscapes, biogenic architecture, and sustainable infrastructure coalesce to intensify symbiotic exchanges between university, community, and ecology, creating a model for a vital campus that embraces a regenerative relationship with our shared environment.
[i] Climate data throughout is based on projections published in the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment (first published in 2024), as well as the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
