The Buffalo Niagara Region
Buffalo ranks highly. Here's why...
Buffalo ranks as one of the best college towns in America, according to the College Destinations Index published by the American Institute for Economic Research. You can find the comprehensive and independent rankings at http://www.aier.org/.
Situated in upstate New York, close to the international border with Canada and a short distance from Niagara Falls, Buffalo is a city with one of America's most significant centers of architecture and planning. Writing about the city, the internationally renowned architectural historian and critic, Reyner Banham, suggested that:
“Anybody who knows enough of architecture to care about it will already know that two of the world’s most celebrated office buildings were built here: Adler and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building of 1896, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building almost a decade later –
and if the Larkin has been gone for over thirty years, the Guaranty…is with us still, after many vicissitudes, to remind us of Buffalo’s golden age of architecture.
And it does not stand alone. Great buildings do not occur in isolation; they grow out of flourishing architectural cultures where the habits of good construction and imaginative planning have solidity and momentum.”
Describing the impact of those cultures on the city, Banham noted that:
“Olmsted’s plan held the center together, and its influence extended beyond the grounds contained within the loop, defining the new, preferred areas for residential building.
Thus, the plan directly created the site for one of the five houses of world stature by Frank Lloyd Wright that grace the Buffalo scene, Soldiers Place, which provides the greenery in front of the big porch of the Heath House.
But the influence of the plan extends northeast into the Parkside area – designed by Olmsted though executed differently – and beyond, and thus also gave the sites for the classic Martin house and its outliers, the Barton house and the gardener’s cottage, and further afield still, the site for the Davidson house, on Tillinghast Place.
Now, these five works of America's greatest domestic architect raise two topics of crucial importance in understanding the quality of Buffalo architecture; first, all were built for members of the Martin connection, the administrative "cadre" who ran Buffalo's most prodigious industrial builder, the Larkin Company, in its most impressive years; second, they were the final seal of excellence set upon a remarkable body of residential architecture and planning, so important for the city that it demands immediate attention.”
Banham highlighted another significant aspect of the city’s built legacy. “Buffalo,” he suggested, “also retains a rare and noble set of another kind of transitional industrial buildings – grain elevators.”
“Through frequent photographic illustration in European publications they may have done almost as much as the Buffalo works of Wright and Sullivan to shape the progress of modern architecture world-wide. Walter Gropius knew these photographs, as did Le Corbusier. Erich Mendelsohn was the first of many pilgrims to come to Buffalo to see for himself.”
