Experimental Units

About: A new set of research laboratories has been established at the school to focus resources, creativity and precision on key issues facing the next generations of experts devoted to the built environment.

While new forms of expertise are constantly being developed within the individual programs at the school, these new labs gather some of these emergent trajectories together and focus them on a series of applied research experiments. Each lab constitutes a mini think-tank that takes on a limit set of collaborative partnerships with other units of the university and with colleagues outside the university to carry out projects that could not be done independently of such partnerships. Some of the labs will themselves collaborate when their particular joint expertise is needed.

The work of the labs is integrated into the teaching programs within the school. Existing courses, particularly studios and research seminars, will often act as the site for key parts of the experiments, with research assistants drawn from the Masters and Ph.D. programs. The labs also organize events (lectures, workshops, or symposia), and produce publications. Considerable emphasis is placed on the research findings but also the ongoing debates addressed by the research and the new forms of research these debates will provoke.

This set of interlinked research labs constitute a formidable think-tank incubating and accelerating the latest thinking on the built environment.