Banham's Buffalo: Peter Reyner Banham Fellows at Buffalo

Peter Reyner Banham, the renowned architectural historian and cultural critic, taught in the newly founded architecture program at the State University of New York at Buffalo between 1976 and 1980. During his tenure at Buffalo, inspired by the daylight factories and the grain silos of the region, he conducted research that led to his seminal book, A CONCRETE ATLANTIS, illuminating the relationship between American industrial buildings and European Modern Architecture. The Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship program at Buffalo was established in 2000 to celebrate Banham's legacy at Buffalo, and, most importantly, to project new work that is inspired by Banham's foundational body of scholarship on material and visual culture. Each year, the Banham Fellow engages the students and the faculty of the department through research, creative activity, and teaching, and presents that body of work through an exhibition and a lecture. Here, the projections of the past five Banham Fellows are documented: Jonathan Solomon (2005-2006), Sergio Lopez-Pineiro (2006-2007), Eva Franch-Gilabert (2007-2008), Michael Kubo (2008-2009), Brian Tabolt (2009-2010). This document is a testament to the reach of Banham's visions and to the visionary work of the Fellows at Buffalo.

Mehrdad Hadighi:
Professor Mehrdad Hadighi completed his post-professional studies at Cornell University, and holds a professional degree in architecture and a degree in studio art from the University of Maryland. His scholarly work focuses on drawing parallels between 20th century theory and criticism and the constructive principles of architecture. Hadighi’s premiated design competition entries include the Studentenheim + Bauernmarkt, Glockengasse (1995), Public Space in the New American City, Atlanta (1994), Berlin Alexanderplatz Design Competition (1993), Austrian Cultural Institute in Manhattan (1992), and the Peace Garden Design Competition (1989).

He has produced site specific installations for galleries in Washington, DC, Buffalo, Ithaca and New York City, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Council on the Creative and Performing Arts. The Architectural League of New York selected Hadighi as one of the six Notable Young Architects.

Recently, Hadighi was selected as one of ?25 most intriguing, innovative and intrepid architects, from all over the world” by Wallpaper* magazine in their 2004 Annual Design Directory issue; and as one of ?10 Young Firms Reshaping the Globe” by the Architectural Record magazine in their 2003 Design Vanguard issue.

Brian Tabolt:
Brian Tabolt received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with High Honors from the University of Virginia, where he was the recipient of the Z Society Edgar J Shannon Award for Design Excellence. Tabolt has worked in the offices of SHoP Architects and Agrest & Gandelsonas in New York among others. He has been an invited critic at Syracuse University, Parsons School of Design, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Barnard College in addition to teaching architectural design studio at the University at Buffalo. Tabolt has also been an assistant instructor at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. In 2003 his collaboration with Peter Waldman received Second Prize in the Free Union School Competition in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tabolt was a founding editor and co-designer of Pidgin, a journal of the Graduate students of the Princeton University School of Architecture, now in its 6th bi-annual issue.

Tabolt's research will focus on reestablishing instrumental links between architecture and the contemporary American city. Essential to this research is an investigation of the formless quality of the contemporary city, read as the product of a collision between avant-garde ambitions and mass-cultural desires. The megastructure - modernism's last gasp to organize and combat the dispersed condition its own urban schemes had helped create - will be brushed against the grain of its original intentions for rigid management to create architectural proposals more open to this formless context. Through this technique, the normally strategic ambition of the megastructure becomes a tactic for rethinking the relationship between architecture and the city, the individual and the collective, at a variety of scales.

Michael Kubo:
Michael Kubo has been appointed as the 2008 Banham Fellow. Michael studied at the University of Massachusetts, where he received his B.A. in Architecture magna cum laude in 2000, and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he received the M.Arch in 2006, completing his thesis with distinction. His current practice spans across the domains of writing, teaching, editing, and publishing. Kubo’s editorial work is based on an alternative understanding of publishing as a critical form of architectural practice, in which publications can give structure to architectural concepts and elaborate new methodologies where the production of the book-object and modes of architectural investigation are inseparable in form and content. Some of the