The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning has selected the winner for The Resilient Campus, an international design competition. The competition was launched in August 2025, and the seven shortlisted teams were announced in October 2025.
The winner is LTL Architects + Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects + Derive Engineers, with second going to Stoss Landscape Urbanism + Höweler Yoon Architecture, and third place going to MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio + Second Nature Ecology and Design. An honourable mention was given to MVRDV + RIOS for their experimental visualizations.
“I extend my sincere gratitude to all of the teams for the creativity and intelligence they brought to this competition,” said Julia Czerniak, competition coordinator and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning.
The design teams were tasked with developing and applying strategies to create an ecologically robust, resilient landscape for the University of Buffalo’s South Campus. At the building scale, teams developed and applied an adaptive strategy for a portion of the existing Health Sciences Complex and a schematic approach to a university-assisted public school.
“The winning project, ‘Field Studies: Growing a Biogenic Campus,’ reimagines South Campus as a productive landscape shaped by geothermal wells, productive forests, and buildings grown from biogenic constructions materials,” said Charles Waldheim, chair of the competition jury and professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. “Their proposal conceives of campus resilience through circular economies of plant materials and their infrastructures shaping a robust public forest landscape.”
Stoss Landscape Urbanism + Höweler Yoon Architecture’s proposal, ‘Campus Entanglements: Protocols for Learning,’ presented an atlas of landscape and architectural types to guide the long-term transformation of South Campus, earning them second place, explains Jason Sowell, associate professor in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning and the competition advisor.
Third-place proposal ‘Our Future is a Forest’ developed by MASS + EinwillerKuehl + SITELAB Urban Studio +Second Nature Ecology and Design, reimagined the campus through afforestation, positioning a renewed forest landscape as both ecological infrastructure and an expanded educational resource for human and non-human communities.
The final team submissions are currently on display as an exhibition in 116 Crosby Hall on the University of Buffalo’s South Campus through March 13. The exhibition will travel to the Aedes architecture gallery in Berlin in March, followed by other international venues.
The upcoming fall symposium at UB will critique the work through different disciplinary frameworks, considering climate change, biodiversity loss, and human vulnerability, and how these design strategies can be replicated across all scales of the built environment.
Find out more about the entries and the exhibition on the The Resilient Campus competition website.
Images: Courtesy of the University of Buffalo