The shift toward more expansive forms of digital production within the design and construction industry affords opportunities of not only reconfiguring the relationships between the key players, but also incorporating industry sectors not typically associated with building construction. At the core of this shift is the integration of communication through various forms of digital networks, CNC fabrication being just one among many, with the ambition of developing a comprehensive, well organized, easily accessible, and parametrically adaptable body of information that coordinates the process from design through a building’s lifecycle. This is the broader context for the goals of the Laboratory for Applied Building Science.

Over the next 25 years, it is projected that China will account for 50% of the world's new construction. The majority of this construction will occur in existing cities, or newly formed urban areas. It is the mission of the China Megacities Lab to become actively engaged with this rapid urbanization and spatial production occurring in China, through both research and design.

Political and cultural conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response? Air and water quality fluctuate: what if a cloud of light above the river modulated its color as a public display of contamination? Demands for occupation of space shift across days, seasons, and years: what if traditionally mute and inert building materials appeared and disappeared accordingly?

In a complex-structured city in which the interactions among parts intensify; in which the number of decision makers and cultural scenarios overlap, interconnect, and sometimes collide; in which the temporal dimensions of the citizens are dissimilar; in which local and global, physical and virtual dimensions co-exist, it is necessary to identify a set of design tools which could respond to design complexity. That is why in the last fifteen years, architects adopted advanced digital tools such as algorithms, dynamic relationships, parametric systems, mapping, morphogenesis, cellular automata, and bifurcation with broken symmetry.

The Conservation Laboratory serves as the primary teaching venue for conservation courses where lectures, demonstrations, and practicums take place. It supports such courses as Structures, Systems and Materials Iⅈ Architectural Metals; American Architectural Finishes; Concrete, Cast Stone & Mortar; Stone, Brick & Terracotta; Conservation Workshop; and is the fundamental locus for Basic Conservation Science and Laboratory course. Thesis research is also conducted in the laboratory.

The Community & Capital Action Research Lab (C²ARL) provides an infrastructure for cutting-edge research, critical discourse, and empirically informed practice on fundamental questions related to the incessant tension between the needs of community and the imperatives of capital.