File:John F. Kennedy Recreation Center, Buffalo, New York - 20200822.jpg

English: John F. Kennedy Recreation Center, 114 Hickory Street at Clinton Street, Buffalo, New York, August 2020. Built to serve a new public housing community intended for a 72-acre (30 ha), 36-square-block expanse of Near East Side land that was leveled in 1959 the name of urban renewal but not fully replaced with new housing until the 1990s, the design of the John F. Kennedy Recreation Center served as the Master's thesis by virtue of which locally-born architect Robert Traynham Coles graduated from the MIT School of Architecture; Buffalo's city fathers of the time were so impressed with it that they invited him to actually construct the building on the site he'd proposed for it. Its façade and structural composition of poured precast concrete recall Brutalism, but the low-pitched barrel-arched roof crowning the main portion of the structure and the sleek boxiness of the cantilevered second story extending northward toward Clinton Street make it a paragon through and through of the International Style's 1960s-era iteration. Today, along with the Postmodern-style Frank Merriweather Library erected in 2006, Coles has cited the John F. Kennedy Recreation Center as one of his two favorites among his own designs.