蜜桃传媒

“You’re like the kid from ‘A Christmas Story,’” Graci says. “You can’t even move, you’ve got so many scarves and hats and stuff on as a little kid sitting in the freezing cold.”

The Bills have come a long way since those days and so has Graci. He arrived at the School of Architecture and Planning in 2005, set on taking a love of building things—Legos, blocks, whatever—and turning it into a career. Graci got his professional start working as a concrete laborer in the summer. He worked summer internships with the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, which handled construction projects on the UB campus. Graci found himself working on whatever was necessary, be it fire alarm upgrades, renovations or additions to buildings. During his time at UB, Graci realized he had a talent and “the itch for construction management,” he says.

Graci worked his way through the industry, serving as a project manager and engineer at some of Western New York’s most prominent construction firms. He felt he was on track to work a comfortable career as an executive. But in 2022, he fielded a call from John Polka III, BS ’03, a mentor who had taken a role in stadium operations for the local National Football League franchise. Polka knew of Graci from UB, where he felt Graci had emerged with “discipline and the understanding of what goes into a project,” as well as an innate ability to be personable and work as part of a team. Adding Graci became a priority for Polka’s team.

The chance, Graci says, was “once in a lifetime.” He joined the Bills that year as assistant director of stadium construction for the New Highmark Stadium that is slated to open in 2026. As the build has progressed, so has Graci’s standing within the organization. He is now director of stadium construction, with the project moving toward its conclusion, just one NFL season away.

“I just couldn’t pass it up,” he says.

Graci’s job is huge in every way. He directs much of the work on the ground for a project that might have more than 1,000 people on site in Orchard Park on any given day. He is directing the building of a stadium that will cost more than $2 billion, which will be a crown jewel for Western New York, the home for the region’s most visible cultural institution. On football Sundays, 60,000 people will visit, and millions more will take in the stadium on television, wondering if they should one day make the trip. The New York governor’s office estimates that the project has created 10,000 union construction jobs and believes it will bring a 30-year economic impact of $1.6 billion to the region.

In the eye of the storm is Graci, part of a collection of born-and-bred Western New Yorkers working to erect the stadium. Though the project draws on expertise from all over the country and world, both Graci and Polka—and many of their team members—grew up cheering for the Bills and are now building the stadium for the team of their youth. The Buffalonians keep each other going.

“We just feed off each other,” Graci says. “We tell each other all the time, ‘You know, we can’t screw this up, and if we keep on working like we’re doing, we’re not going to screw it up.’” 

At UB, Graci converted his childhood passion for building (and the Bills) into a durable career path. His architecture and planning curriculum imparted many lessons on time management.

“I learned sometimes you’ve just got to turn the light off and go home,” Graci says. “That helped me out a lot in construction management and in my current position, because you learn to prioritize what you absolutely need to get done.”

Getting through the program was an exercise in staying calm—good preparation, it turns out, for leading construction projects.

For that reason, immersing students in several challenges at once is part and parcel of UB’s program. Korydon Smith, MArch ’01, BPS ’99, department chair of architecture, says that there’s “no real beginning and end” to a proper architectural education and that resilience is an especially critical trait of a successful UB architecture student.

“Architecture is a lot of gray area, not just black-and-white decision-making, and trying to make multiple decisions simultaneously that go into any building design,” Smith says. “You have multiple stakeholders, multiple issues, money, environmental issues, code issues, aspirations of the client. You’re trying to balance all of those things. And so, it takes time to go through a rigorous process of decision-making.”

It is a pride point for the school’s architecture program, Smith says, that so many graduates have used their training in the program to work not just as architects but in a host of related fields.

“To see them particularly on a project that is the biggest project in our backyard, I think is quite special. And especially when many of those people grew up Buffalo Bills fans themselves,” Smith says. 

The UB ties to the project run deep. Polka, Graci’s mentor who is now the Bills’ vice president of stadium development, studied civil engineering at the university. Coincidentally, neither man’s job with the Bills is exactly what he studied in school, but the skills they garnered at UB have been vital to their work on the stadium.

“We both really used our background in our respective fields, in architecture and in engineering,” Polka says. “Really, I think what you’ve learned through that is the discipline and the understanding of what goes into a project. And then I think being personable and being able to collaborate with teams is really what has made Todd successful in his role with the team, and why he and I mesh well.”

The point about team collaboration is critical. Graci’s job varies by the day, but one constant is meetings. So, so many meetings.

“My calendar is an absolute nightmare,” he says. Not that he is complaining. Graci’s job is to ensure that the stadium site’s many construction workers march to the same drumbeat as the project’s managers, the architects behind the plan, and the Bills themselves. In directing all of it, Graci often harkens back to a lesson he took from his days at the university.

“If you’re going to make it through that program at UB, you’ve got to earn it,” he says. “They throw so much at you … and it’s on you to not burn yourself out.”

Graci’s objective is to help the Bills build a stadium that delights everyone from quarterback Josh Allen and coach Sean McDermott to a member of “Bills Mafia”—the kind of fan Graci was when he was a kid, coming to games with his mom. That is a tricky job. A superstar quarterback needs different things out of a football stadium than a fan in the stands, and Graci must look out for all of them.

“We have walked the path a thousand times that Josh and the football players, coaches, VIPs and ownership will take, from where they start their day to where they end up in the locker room,” he explains. “And it goes just as much for a fan. We have not made one decision—construction, design or budget—that we haven’t sat back and said, ‘How does this affect the fan?’”

The pressure is immense. The existing stadium is a beloved landmark, albeit one lacking many modern amenities. When the team releases fresh renderings of the upcoming stadium, Graci acknowledges that he still sometimes checks the comments people leave. Those remarks sometimes skew negative, so Graci gets back to work. “You kind of try to stay out of the comments,” he says. He knows that fans’ ultimate impressions of the new stadium will come once they have visited it.

“We’ve spent a lot of time and energy and thoughtfulness to make sure that what made those memories in the existing stadium are going to transcend into the new stadium, and you’re going to make even newer memories and even more memories,” he says. 

At UB’s new Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Benedict says AI can help advance structural biology. “I’m interested to see what’s going on to better understand crystal structures, and how machine learning may be a new tool to dig deep for interactions faster and more efficiently than human eyeballs.” 

With the combined brainpower at UB-HWI, the institute will reveal paths to critical medical advances as it supports academic, government, industry and non-profit researchers, thanks to Hauptman-Woodward’s legacy of bold experimentation and intellect.

The local upbringing of so many of the project’s leaders will show up in the stadium’s design. Graci and Polka know, for example, just how critical the outside tailgating scene is to the experience of being a Bills fan. So the parking lots will be meant to encourage even more of it.

“Our core team within the Bills are basically all from the Western New York area or have immediate ties to the area,” Polka says. “There’s a lot of pride working on the project and seeing what we’re creating for the next 30, maybe 50, years. I also think that’s important to the project because we’re making decisions on a daily basis that represent, in our opinion, what our fan base wants.”

By the time the venue opens for football in the summer of 2026, Graci will have been on the project for four years. The new stadium will not be so new to him. As he bounces from meeting to meeting to make the stadium a reality, Graci thinks often of the coming moment when Bills Mafia will walk through the new building’s gates and start watching games inside.

“I just can’t wait until opening day to walk around and see the fans seeing all this stuff,” Graci says.

“Quite frankly, I could walk the building blindfolded, I’ve been in the model and the drawings for so long. It’s almost like you were building a new house. By the time you get done with it, it’s really not a new house to you, right? Because you’ve been there since day one.”