Architectural Resources

Architectural Resources, which styles itself A|r, is a Buffalo architecture practice founded in 1991 at 505 Franklin Street, with a second office in New York City. The roughly 70-person firm works across adaptive reuse, healthcare, higher education, commercial and multifamily projects, with a particular depth in historic industrial conversions in western New York. A|r was architect on the $112 million Trico Building Apartments, the conversion of the seven-story, 500,000-square-foot Trico Products Plant No. 1 into 242 apartments plus 56,000 square feet of commercial space, completed in February 2025 in partnership with the Krog Group. The building had been headed for demolition before the reuse scheme came together.

Vertical transportation engineering is the part of A|r that catches people off guard. The firm keeps a dedicated group of elevator, lift and escalator specialists with more than forty years of hands-on experience, and sells that expertise as a standalone consulting service — not something most 70-person design practices carry in house.

The second specialism is behavioral health: inpatient and treatment settings for people recovering from mental illness, designed around the needs of patients, families and caregivers. Maryvale Psychiatric Inpatient Hospital and the nurse stations at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center sit in that part of the portfolio.

Education and civic work carries similar weight. Featured projects include the SUNY Potsdam facilities master plan, the St. Elizabeth Hospital campus reuse master plan, the Netzer Administration Building at SUNY Oneonta, a classroom building at SUNY Buffalo State, the University at Buffalo Sports Performance Center, Horizon Village and Hilary’s House.

Seven services are offered separately: architectural and interior design; vertical transportation engineering; facilities assessment and master planning; campus and urban planning; historic preservation and adaptive reuse; sustainable design and deep energy retrofit; and building information modeling with rendering.

A|r says it was among the first firms in the country to bring building information modeling into everyday practice, and it keeps those models current after handover so facilities managers can use them for maintenance and planning. The sustainability position is framed the same practical way: high-performance buildings should be regenerative and give back more than they take, a standard the firm applies to deep energy retrofits of existing stock as much as to new construction.

Two offices take work — 505 Franklin Street in Buffalo on 716-883-5566, and 303 West 13th Street in New York City on 212-674-1457.