Competition Held to Design, Build New School of Medicine Downtown

It is the largest new building project in the City of Buffalo in decades.

Competing firms will present their proposals March 16-22. They will be publicly exhibited March 28, and a final selection will be made March 29.

With the leadership of the State University Construction Fund, UB is organizing the competition to acquire the best talent possible.

“The architecture of the new medical school should represent the university’s aspirations to build a world-class health sciences campus as part of a UB Downtown Campus,” says the competition’s director, Robert Shibley, dean of the UB School of Architecture and Planning.

“Equally important, the building must provide state-of the-art educational, administrative and research spaces that foster academic excellence.”

Designers will be challenged to place their architectural approach to the project in the context of the surrounding community, Shibley says. The new building will serve as an entrance to downtown Buffalo from the north on Main Street and an entrance into the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus from Allen and North streets.

The space-usage program for the new UB building is being written with a number of priorities in mind, Shibley says.

“We want it to create a ‘front door’ to the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and emphasize its student-learning environment and the interdisciplinary collaboration between the school’s academic departments.”

In addition, the building must feature an environment that supports funded research.

Of the 19 international firms originally in the running for the contract, the competition selection committee has pared the applicants to five: Cannon Design, Diller Scofidio+Renfro/Gensler, Grimshaw Architects, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum and Rafael Vinoly.

At a workshop held for competitors last month, UB’s project team discussed the project vision, the city and regional context for the competition as well as the design challenge. Submission requirements for the competition RFP were provided.

At that time, competitors met with the project team and selection committee in an open workshop format, and toured UB’s South Campus and downtown.

The competition is part of a $375 million plan to relocate the medical school to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. The project is part of the next phase of the UB 2020 plan, and is partially funded by a NYSUNY 2020 Challenge Grant.

When completed in 2016, the new medical school will be in close proximity to UB’s other signature buildings on the medical campus:

• a new Clinical and Translational Science Institute under construction as part of the joint UB-Kaleida Health building on Goodrich and Ellicott streets
• an Educational Opportunity Center on Goodell Street, also under construction
• the new UB Downtown Gateway building (former M. Wile building) on Goodell Street
• UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences on Ellicott Street
  
• UB’s Research Institute on Addictions on Main Street