The Labs
Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-LAB)
Director: Jeffrey Inaba
The mission of CLAB is to test experimental forms of architectural communication. Rethinking architecture at a global scale, the lab sets up creative partnerships to broaden the range and increase the intensity of architectural discourse - launching unique events, provisional networks, special issues of magazines, video streams, television, radio and webcasts. The lab acts as a kind of training camp and energy source for incubating new channels for debate about architecture.
Laboratory for Applied Building Science
Director: Phillip Anzalone
Manager: Nathan Carter
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.
Spatial Information Design Lab
Directors: Laura Kurgan
The GSAPP Spatial Information Design Lab is a think- and action-tank for the visual display of spatial information. Its founding and ongoing project has been a university wide one, to develop a meta-data standard for the growing archive of GIS data, and a suitable interface for this kind of spatial data. The lab will take a productive and yet critical approach to the field of GIS, and work with spatial data to design innovative ways in which the resulting images, or maps, might communicate what they picture with clarity, integrity, responsibility, creativity and invention.
China Megacities Lab
Director: Jeffrey Johnson
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.
Urban Landscape Lab
Directors: Janette Kim and Katherine Orff
The Urban Landscape Lab is an interdisciplinary applied research group at Columbia University in the City of New York. We focus on the role of design in the analysis and transformation of the joint built-natural environment, and study ecological processes and urban systems as hybrid phenomenon through targeted pilot projects, practical strategies, and experiments.
The Latin American and Caribbean Laboratory (Latin Lab)
Director: Clara Irazábal, PhD
The Latin American and Caribbean Laboratory (Latin Lab) serves as an intellectual platform for research, educational, and service initiatives related to architecture and urban planning in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Based at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), the Lab aims to become a leading laboratory for the study of the built environment and community development in LAC and its diasporas and a premier resource to assist in the just and sustainable transformations of LAC territories and communities. The Lab's primary lines of work are Migration and Ethno-Urbanism, Urban Resilience and Upgrading, and Transnational and Regional Planning.
Urban Design Lab
Director: Richard Plunz
The Urban Design Lab (UDL) of the Earth Institute and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) works to find innovative solutions to the sustainable development issues confronting cities. The UDL conducts multidisciplinary applied design research in collaboration with community-based organizations and other public and private interests.
The UDL's team works closely with outside experts in architecture, ecology, economics, environmental science, public health, urban design and urban planning.
Network Architecture Lab
Director: Kazys Varnelis
The Network Architecture Lab is an experimental unit that embraces the studio and the seminar as venues for architectural analysis and speculation, exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production and environment design.
Living Architecture Lab
Director: David Benjamin and Soo-In Yang
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?
Non Linear Solutions Unit
Director: Caterina M. Tiazzoldi
Technological Change Lab (TCLAB)
Director: Smita Srinivas
TCLab is a Columbia university-based research and advisory program established in 2007 and directed by Prof. SMITA SRINIVAS of the Urban Planning program. It is housed at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).
The intellectual focus of TCLab is in understanding (a) the characteristics of economic and technological change, and especially industrial transformation of countries, cities and regions and (b) the conditions under which considerations of efficiency and equity can evolve alongside.
Sustainable Urbanism International
SUI works with governments, communities, and private investors to develop strategies for urban development that bring about the benefits of modernization while minimizing the cultural dislocations arising from it.
Global Africa Lab
Co-Directors: Mario Gooden, AIA and Mabel Wilson, PhD