Overview

The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning presents “What We Did Last Summer,” a student work exhibition documenting the outcomes of UB’s summer study programs, both domestic and international. The exhibition runs April 6 through May 18, 2026, in Crosby Hall on UB’s South Campus in Buffalo, New York. An opening event takes place on April 8, 2026, with registration available online.

The exhibition gathers work produced across studios, workshops, and seminars held in multiple locations during the summer. Rather than a conventional student showcase, it functions as a collective record of learning conducted outside the standard studio environment, tracking how direct engagement with unfamiliar geographies, climates, materials, and practices reshapes design thinking.

Focus

The work on display spans drawings, guidebooks, postcards, mappings, and digital fabrications produced during summer programs across seven locations. Each program placed students in cultural and environmental contexts distinct from their home institution, asking them to translate lived experience into design output. The exhibition positions this material not as polished final projects but as a process record: evidence of encounter with unfamiliar scale, tradition, climate, and modes of practice.

The range of output formats is itself significant. Guidebooks and postcards alongside technical drawings and digital fabrications suggest that the programs encouraged diverse representational modes, treating documentation and communication as design practices in their own right rather than secondary to built or drawn proposals. This reflects a pedagogical position aligned with contemporary architectural education’s broader engagement with field research and ethnographic methods.

These works offer a record of learning that extends beyond the typical studio or classroom setting, demonstrating how exposure to diverse places and ways of working can expand design imagination, critical reflection, and our disciplinary perspectives.
UB School of Architecture and Planning, Exhibition Description, 2026

Program Locations

The exhibition brings together work from eight summer program locations, spanning domestic and international contexts across different climatic, cultural, and urban conditions.

The Ireland/Scotland program is directed by Kenneth Mackay. Full program director credits for the remaining locations were not listed in the exhibition documentation available at the time of writing.

Curatorial Approach

The exhibition is curated by Maia Peck, Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of Exhibitions at UB’s School of Architecture and Planning. Peck previously co-curated the “In Her Steps: Bethune Exhibition” (also on view at UB in Spring 2026), which documented 18 women architects across 20 years of the Bethune Lecture Series. Her curatorial practice at UB appears focused on making visible work that institutional formats, lecture series, studio reviews, and summer programs produce but do not typically preserve or display for broader audiences.

Audience

The exhibition is open to the public at Crosby Hall, UB South Campus, through May 18, 2026. Its primary audience is the UB architecture and planning community, though its location and six-week run make it accessible to local and visiting professionals interested in design education and field-based pedagogies. The mix of program locations and output formats gives it broader relevance for those tracking how North American architecture schools are structuring international and experiential learning.

Event Details