Research + Design
The College of Environmental Design (CED) is one of the world’s most distinguished laboratories for experimentation, research, and intellectual synergy. Our research centers and academic departments pioneered an integrated approach to analyzing, understanding, and designing our built environment that continues to this day.
CED’s mission is to provide leadership to address the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. We tackle issues from multiple perspectives and across disciplines — architecture, city and regional planning, landscape architecture and environmental planning, urban design, and real estate development and design — always with the understanding that environmental design is inseparable from society, culture, politics, and economics. Our faculty and students view environmental design as an exploratory spatial practice, aimed at creating forms of building, landscape, and urban plans that have yet to be imagined. At the same time, we believe that environmental design must be a profoundly ethical practice, coproduced through dynamic engagements with diverse communities and policy-makers.
Our design and research practices are centered on four main themes.
Research Centers + Labs
The Terner Center for Housing Innovation’s mission is to formulation bold strategies to house families from all walks of life in vibrant, sustainable, and affordable homes and communities. Their work provides analysis and data-driven research to support policy and innovation for policymakers, practitioners, and advocates.
The Center for the Built Environment’s mission is to improve the environmental quality and energy efficiency of buildings by providing timely, unbiased information on building technologies, design and operation strategies. CBE brings together industry leaders and researchers to produce substantial, holistic, and far-sighted research on buildings.
CED faculty across departments and disciplines direct research labs that tackle a range of environmental and design issues. These labs are engines for the production of knowledge and new discoveries in the college and provide valuable research opportunities for students.
Research from the Center for Cities + Schools shows how low-wealth districts are being left behind and informs the current debate over policy reform. The National Center on School Infrastructure (NCSI) is a national resource hub for modernizing school buildings and grounds.
