Lenses: Ways of Seeing Buffalo and Its Architecture is a unique collaboration between four Buffalo institutions engaged in the cultural life of Buffalo, NY: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Buffalo History Museum, the Lipsey Architecture Center Buffalo, and Preservation Buffalo Niagara.

Among architecture aficionados, Buffalo has long had a strong reputation as both a repository for great talent and an inspiration point for great talent. In 1940, the Albright Art Gallery invited Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., widely considered the father of American architectural history, to make an exhibition about Buffalo’s architecture, mirroring one that then Gallery Director Gordon Washburn had seen mounted in Worcester, MA. The Buffalo exhibition, seen by more than 30,000 visitors to the Gallery during its month-long run, concluded with Mr. Hitchcock’s assertion:

“The hope of the future must lie at least as much in the establishment of a new and broader frame of planning, as in the erection of single buildings of distinction. The future ought also to provide some means of preserving the finer moments of the past, instead of allowing that indiscriminate destruction which has, during the present century, removed far more excellent buildings than have been built.”

The current exhibition Lenses: Ways of Seeing Buffalo and Its Architecture is both based upon, and placed in counterpoint to, the original exhibition, in both intention and display.

It also takes a reflective, questioning view of Hitchcock’s pronouncements regarding which parts of Buffalo’s built environment have value and seeks to contextualize Hitchcock’s work by delving into city builders and social histories not represented in his work: women, African Americans, Indigenous people, and all of those outside of the “Great Man” theory of stylistic formalism that Hitchcock espoused.

The Beyond Hitchcock portion of the exhibit is a collaboration between Preservation Buffalo Niagara Executive Director Jessie Fisher and University of Buffalo Professor Dr. Charles L. Davis II and his students, in which the canonicity presented in the original 1940 exhibit is re-imagined and re-worked.

Lenses includes new graphical and written material to encourage visitors to reflect on how the privileged white male academic gaze has shaped how we perceive value in our built world, and how that perception of value shapes what parts of its architectural legacy Buffalo has protected and what parts it has lost. It is designed to give attendees a more diverse and inclusive look at architectural and preservation values, and to encourage more equitable community building practices for the future.

In addition to the exhibition, a speakers series will take place March through April that will bring local, national, and international scholars and practitioners to Buffalo to discuss the themes of the exhibit in greater depth.

Through Sunday April 10
The Lipsey Architecture Center Buffalo
Richardson Olmsted Campus
Buffalo, NY
Details