Thank you so much for looking into my portfolio. My name is Jehlani Williams, a student at University at Buffalo studying Environmental Design and Architecture. As you scroll through this website, you will see examples of work I have completed over my undergraduate career (2020-2024), as well as examples of projects I completed for internships and personal work. I truly am proud of how much I was able to learn and how much I was able to create in four short years.

MY GOALS

“I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born — where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world.

It is rich — or at least it looks rich. It is clean — because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are — and indeed they do. And it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know — you know instinctively that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you?” - James Baldwin

Designing public spaces has easily become my biggest passion over the years. The idea that we—as planners, urban designers, or architects—can positively impact how people view their environment is something that truly fascinates me. The biggest thing I hope to achieve in my future career is to create a community’s Third Place, a term coined by Ray Oldenburg. I want to create places where people want to be, not places where they need to be. Aside from work and home, there are not many places the general public wants to be at. Most importantly, I want to create these places in underrepresented communities—Communities not rewarded with bustling green main streets. I want to create places that create a sense of belonging—a luxury that has popularly only been seen in the “white world”.