Solar Stand on Wall Street Journal list of Best Architecture of 2014

An article in The Wall Street Journal listingThe Best Architecture of 2014includes UBs Solar Strand, calling the 3,200-panel, ground-mounted photovoltaic array a small but telling model of landscape architecture at its most forward-thinking.

Envisioning energy as part of the cultural and built landscape, the Solar Strandstands at the main entrance to UB's North Campus and provides a striking but practical campus gateway. The 750-kilowatt array generates enough energy to power hundreds of student apartments while offsetting the emission of nearly 400 tons of greenhouse gases annually.

At a time when fields of PV panels and wind turbine farms are a reality, planted in vast undifferentiated arrays that assault the eye, not to mention birds and other animals, Solar Strand offers a thoughtful alternative, writes Julie V. Iovine, the Journals architecture critic.

The array was designed by the celebrated landscape architect, artist and educatorWalter Hood, who was selected through an international design competition sponsored by UB.

The design competition, which attracted an initial field of 23 artists and landscape architects from around the world, called for a solar array that would be integrated into the campus landscape, accessible to students and the community, and representative of a new design vocabulary for solar installations around the world.

The project got its start in 2009 when the New York Power Authority approached UB with an interest in funding the construction of a conventional, ground-mounted photovoltaic array across several acres at the North Campus entrance. University leadership took the project to the next level, with NYPAs support, proposing to elevate design standards for the project through an international design competition.

Robert Shibley, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, UBs campus architect and chair of the selection committee for the competition, reflected on the design process in a recent article inDomus, an international architectural publication:

To transform a simple utility field into a land art installation, we mounted an international design competition that asked artists to consider solar panels as their medium and our campus gateway as their canvas. We were presenting the opportunity to make art from something that tended to be somewhat pedestrian, and that was increasingly subject to not-in-my-backyard obstruction. I think for some artists thats a very interesting challenge.

Hoods winning vision was to build the installation into the campus landscape. The 15-acre site features regenerating meadows, a meandering creek and vernal pools. Set in the background are the universitys chilled water plant and generator system.

The Solar Strands design logic is based on the strand concept: a linear landscape formation and DNA fingerprint. Groups of photovoltaic panels are mounted at staggering heights onto supports that stretch in three rows. Walkways run between the rows of panels, connecting the array with local roads, UBs Center for Tomorrow and naturally regenerated meadows and wetland areas that the public can enjoy.

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Solar Stand on Wall Street Journal list of Best Architecture of 2014