The Riverline, Buffalo: An Evolving River Community Landscape
This is an advanced studio course in landscape architectural design, focusing on current environmental and social issues pertaining to the Buffalo River Communities and the abandoned industrial landscape adjacent. experiencing transitional conditions, socially and environmentally. Students will explore historic, contemporary, and evolving conditions in and around this landscape and its ecologies and examine the impact on the individuals and communities that live, work, and play in these environments. They will meet the client who is proposing this project, and study it in the context of the High Line Network. Proposals will explore comprehensive design interventions, engaging multiple scales of resolution. Design solutions will explore and expand upon the conventions of drawing and representation in landscape architecture, using both two-dimensional and three-dimensional drawings as well as three- dimensional physical modeling. Projects will be presented with detailed plans, sections, perspectival / axonometric renderings, and conceptual and topographic models. Grading plans and planting plans will also be developed.
As a part of a region occupied by the Seneca Indians for over 1000 years, Buffalo is situated at the confluence of Lake Erie and the Niagara River. This location made it the “gateway to the west” in the 19th century, as it became an important port at the terminus of the Erie Canal. Railroads soon followed, including the DL&W, whose abandoned line is the focus of this studio. During this time, Buffalo had the largest capacity for grain storage in the country, and the concrete silos were lauded by Le Corbusier in Towards a New Architecture. Many of these silos still stand today in an area looking for a new identity. While Buffalo has a city plan by the Olmsted brothers, this former industrial area in many ways seems cut off from the rest of the city.
The River Communities are between the highway and the Buffalo River in south Buffalo, part of a former industrial area now experiencing change. The old DL&W traversed this area is now being recast as The Riverline by the Western New York Land Conservancy.
