Minoru Yamasaki's One M&T Plaza in Buffalo. Photo by Vik Pahwa.

Architecture critic Alexandra Lange wrote about Buffalo's legacy by focusing the city's famous parks, historical buildings, service buildings and industrial buildings. Lange asks that ''can architecture bring a city back?'', the most important point of this question is to revive the old buildings by maintaining, upgrading, restoring and repurposing for the 21st century.Lange analyzes the existing landmarks and infractructure of Buffalo to bring them to the stage with a renewed attention.

I don't mean the Bilbao effect, where a single extraordinary building designed by an out-of-town architect suddenly makes a city present to the wider world. Imagine the opposite of that, where a city's existing landmarks and infrastructure, built over preceding decades (sometimes by the Frank Gehrys of their day) are maintained, upgraded, restored, and repurposed for the 21st century. Where the grain elevators captured in their grace and precision by Charles Sheeler, once thought of locally as eyesores, become havens for extreme sports and small-batch beer. Where a psychiatric hospital, once an experiment in humane treatment, reopens as a hotel, a farm-to-table restaurant situated on the ruins of the hospital's therapeutic conservatory. Where renewal can be visualized by asking What Would Olmsted Do? It's too soon to declare the recovery complete, but all of these things are currently happening in Buffalo, New York......Continue Reading

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