Mid-Century Marvel

It was a crisp weekday evening in October as students, architects, neighborhood residents, and a few elected officials mingled on a terrace behind a mid-century modern house that sinks into the landscape in residential Buffalo, New York.  

When the sun set, attendees were invited to retire into the warm glow of the house’s living room and sit cross-legged on the cork-tiled floor around the moderately rusted Malm-style (freestanding, cone-shaped) fireplace that anchors the room’s corner. 

No ordinary house party, this evening marked the first gathering of the Coles House Project, an organization dedicated to carrying forward the legacy of the extraordinary but largely obscured Black architect who designed the house in which the group had gathered: Robert Traynham Coles. 

The story of the Coles House and Studio—and the reason so many people showed up to the gathering—is perhaps best told by going back well before Coles was born, when the city of Buffalo’s urban design was first being conceived. 

Buffalo, New York, is home to the nation’s first comprehensively planned municipal park system. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted—the author of other superlative public spaces, including Central Park, which is about 300 miles downstate—Buffalo’s major recreational green spaces are connected through a series of beautiful, tree-lined parkways. Clearly proud of his work, Olmsted is known to have suggested that “Buffalo is the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds in the United States, if not the world.” 

While cities change and evolve, Olmsted’s parkways in Buffalo still exist. One such parkway, the Humboldt Parkway, which runs through the historically Black Hamlin Park neighborhood on Buffalo’s East Side, still invokes its tree-lined origins.  

But the Humboldt Parkway of today hardly resembles a park.  

That’s because in the 1950s, during a period of urban development that was common for US cities in the mid-20th century, the City of Buffalo Planning Commission began a project to link the Kensington Expressway and the New York State Thruway. A result was the creation of the Scajaquada Expressway, a four-lane sunken highway paved atop Humboldt Parkway that, according to the Olmsted Parks Conservancy, destroyed parts of the nearby Delaware Park, bisected the Hamlin Park neighborhood, and obliterated any semblance of a parkway. The Conservancy further suggests that these combined changes left, for all intents and purposes, a “gash in the urban fabric” that would give way to economic deterioration and lower quality of life. 

The mid-20th century is also around the time Robert Coles graduated with a master’s degree in architecture from MIT and after a short period chose to move back to Buffalo’s Hamlin Park, where he was born and raised. Coles’s MIT thesis focused on designing a new recreation center on Buffalo’s East Side (a project that came to fruition as the John F. Kennedy Recreation Center and is standing today). Therefore, Coles was well informed about the city’s construction plans and aware of how the new highway would disrupt or displace buildings in the area.  

It might seem surprising, then, that in 1961, Coles went out of his way to design and build a combination house/studio smack along the busy new highway—surprising if not for Coles’s remarkable skill as a designer. 

Imagine a visitor from the neighborhood approaching the Coles House from the sidewalk, as cars whiz by at 35 miles per hour. After feeling struck by the house’s proximity to the road (a good 15 yards further back than any other house on the block), they follow a stone path that weaves through bushes and eventually bends to the left to meet the front door. They then step into a hyphen-shaped foyer, which connects a small box of a design studio (to the left) and large box of a home (to the right)—an initial point of compression giving way, in each direction, to warm woods, clean lines, ample light, and a sense of openness. The visitor hooks a right at the hyphen, toward the home portion, and whether they take the half staircase up to the living room or the other staircase down to the kitchen, their eye is drawn, through floor-to-ceiling windows, to a sunken terrace and expansive garden in the backyard. The inside, it feels, is gently flowing out to the nature behind the home.  

It is conspicuously quiet. It is defiantly peaceful. And it remains a testament to how good design can overcome even the most insidious of urban plans. 

For many years, it stood sturdy as the center of Coles’s prolific career, which included work on more than 50 buildings across Buffalo, many of which served public purposes—recreation centers, libraries, schools—on the city’s East Side. But as Coles’s career was coming to a close, it became clear that he intended to sell his house, calling into question the future of Coles’s first true architectural triumph. 

Albert Chao, a licensed architect and alumnus of the University at Buffalo’s (UB) master of architecture program, moved into the house in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. His UB mentor, Omar Khan, the former chair of the Department of Architecture, had offered Coles’s house to Chao as a space of respite, having recently purchased the home from Coles himself, before Coles’s death in 2020.  

For Chao, it didn’t take long for the quality of the house to sink in: “You get privacy . . . there's a lovely garden in the back . . . it was my safe little haven,” he recalls. As Chao began to ask more questions about the architect of his residence, the full figure of Coles as a deeply community-oriented visionary came into focus for him.  

After doing some research, Chao learned that Coles designed and built his combination house/studio in about six months, an almost impossibly quick timeline compared to today’s standards. Coles made use of a “prefabricated” system in which timber and other building materials are set in size, which lowers costs and reduces waste. (The total estimated cost of the parts was $10,000.) Coles broke ground in other ways, too: he was the first Black architect to own his own firm in the Northeast, the first African American chancellor of the American Institute of Architects, and a founding member of the National Organization of Minority Architects. Across these accomplishments, Coles developed a near obsession with supporting Black individuals to become architects (who made up then, and still make up today, only about 2 percent of the field). Chao also learned of a story from people who knew Coles in which Coles was pleased when a local paper referred to him as an “activist” first and an “architect” second.  

With a deeper appreciation of the way Coles approached his work, it’s perhaps wrong to describe the house as a mere design triumph. It is more precisely a marvel and a symbol: of Black modernism, of design justice, and of advocacy in architecture. 

While Chao was living in the house and learning this full extent of Coles’s legacy, he began reaching out to others who had been connected to Coles: former employees and mentees, colleagues, and friends. This network, along with a newer generation of students, architects, and colleagues, began discussing and imagining ways to preserve the house and use it in such a way that would honor Coles’s legacy. 

The network also eventually attracted Scott Ruff, architect and adjunct associate professor at the Pratt Institute, who has built a career around community-engaged practice and teaching. Ruff currently lives in Long Island and attends to an array of projects, but he was brought up eight blocks away from the Coles House. As a student, Ruff says he developed a keen awareness of Coles’s impact on the community. So for him, getting involved was a no-brainer. 

“This is a demigod as far as I am concerned . . . and there’s an opportunity to continue his legacy?” Ruff explains. “Even though I have so many other things I’m doing, why wouldn’t I drop almost everything else and say, yes, this is important?” 

Today, Ruff and Chao are co-directors of the Coles House Project, newly incorporated as a 501(c)(3) organization. The group received a $150,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2023 to build out a strategic plan for the house and establish the nonprofit to facilitate its work. Now, they’re working hard on a grassroots fundraising effort to purchase the house and make critical upgrades to its infrastructure. 

If the Coles House Project was looking for inspiration for a historic preservation project, it wouldn’t need to look far: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House is just a mile away; the nonprofit that operates it serves as a fiscal sponsor for the emerging Coles House Project.  

Chao and Ruff aren’t interested in creating a house museum. As much as they’d be thrilled if people toured the Coles House alongside the Martin House when they visited Buffalo, they say they really want the house and studio to be lived in, worked in, gathered within, and researched. Anything that limited access to the house would dilute the spirit with which Coles approached his craft. Which means the Coles House Project wants to think bigger. 

Chao has led an architectural studio at the house, and a number of his students have shaped their master’s research around other local Coles buildings, helping to fill in the gaps of knowledge about an architect who ought to be much more renowned. Meanwhile, Ruff has advocated for, and is organizing to lay the foundations of, a community design center that would operate out of the Coles House. With the goal of imagining and grounding community-determined needs and processes, a center of this nature might begin by striving to understand common home-related challenges in the neighborhood and equipping residents with resources to improve their own capital assets: fixing porches, upgrading electrical systems, and improving insulation. Inspired by the economy of means that Coles used to build his house, it’s the kind of programming that would help residents remain and thrive, even as the area begins to receive new investment—and as history shows, potentially experience gentrification and displacement. 

Interestingly, too, the City of Buffalo is actively considering the future of the Scajaquada Expressway, an issue about which few groups are better qualified to advocate than the Coles House Project. “We have this opportunity to be a part of that conversation . . . and we’re ready to become part of that politic,” Ruff says. 

With such enormous opportunity swirling, when Ruff and Chao led the gathering at the house on that crisp evening in October, it felt like a new beginning. People already part of the process came to share thoughts and support. People who personally knew Coles shared their memories of his being a “force to be reckoned with.” People new to his work asked questions and listened readily. All were eager to consider the expansive vision for the organization taking shape.

At one point, as laughter and excitement bounced off the walls, Chao took a moment to declare, “This right here is a snapshot of what’s possible: not just to bring people in to learn, but to come together and mobilize.” Exactly (we can imagine) what Coles would have wanted.