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Home > Departments > Facilities Planning & Design > Campus Info > History of UB > University at Buffalo Overview

University at Buffalo Overview

The University of Buffalo was incorporated by an act of the state legislature of New York in 1846. The School of Medicine was the first and only college until 1887, and was located in downtown Buffalo. Schools of Pharmacy, Law, Dentistry and Arts & Sciences followed. In 1926 the University of Buffalo moved to 154 acres on Main Street in the northeast corner of Buffalo (now the South Campus). This land had been the site of the city almshouse and asylum. The firm of E.B. Green designed many of the new buildings on the new campus during the 1930's and 1940's. A second wave of South Campus construction is the 1950's was the work of the firm of James, Meadows & Howard.

In 1962 the private University of Buffalo become the public State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. The increase in students necessitated the erection of a number of "temporary" buildings on the South Campus in the 1960's, most of which still stand today, though plans are in place for the demolition of most of them in the early 2000's.

In the 1960's also came the decision to relocate the entire university to a 1,200 acre site in the town of Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo. Eventually it was decided to keep the South Campus as a health sciences center, and in the 1970's construction on the North Campus began. The firm of Sasaki, Dawson & DeMay developed the master plan for the new campus. While the original master plan called for a 40,000 student population, changes in demographics and the economy resulted in a scaling back of these plans.

The relocation of academic departments and student services to the North Campus still continues; in 2000 the Math Building was completed and the department of Mathematics was relocated to the North Campus. Over the past five years five apartment style student-housing villages have been constructed. Four of these villages are located on the North Campus and the fifth is located adjacent to the North Campus on University Foundation property. The South Campus contains primarily the Schools of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Nursing, Health-Related Professions, and Dentistry. The School of Architecture and Planning, though slated for relocation to the North Campus, will remain on the South Campus. In recent years, via the University Capital Program, many facilities have been renovated. These improvements include new laboratory facilities and IT enhanced classrooms. Currently, the University is in the design phase for a new state of the art facility to house the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics.

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