Research
Our research teams investigate how the world’s buildings are built, how they perform, and how they are governed — so that the people who live in, work on, and are responsible for them can face the next century with confidence.
Material Metabolism
The Material Metabolism team measures the physical flows of cities — what enters, circulates, and leaves the built environment each year, and the embodied carbon carried with it.
Building Stewardship
The Building Stewardship team researches what extends a building's service life — durability, maintenance, preservation, retrofit economics, and adaptive reuse — across climates, construction cultures, and generations of ownership.
Energy & Emissions
The Energy & Emissions team tracks operational carbon across the world's standing stock — benchmarking laws, building-emissions caps, retrofit economics, and the regimes that enforce them.
Applied AI
The Applied AI team researches how foundation models, agentic systems, and machine learning change the way buildings are designed, built, operated, and stewarded.
Policy Forensics
The Policy Forensics team analyses the laws, mandates, and institutional decisions that shape what gets built, preserved, and destroyed.
Civic Equity
The Civic Equity team examines how the built environment distributes wealth, carbon, and harm — and the demographics of who bears each.
Programs
Built Environment Index
A family of analytical releases measuring how the world's buildings perform against the regulatory regimes that govern them. Our first release, the Sustainability Index for New York, is live.
Open the Index
Building Futures
Our convening and collaboration program. We bring together the professions responsible for buildings and support research partnerships aligned with our work.
Learn about Building Futures
Recent publications
- Apr 28, 2026Building Stewardship
The NYC Façade Compliance Atlas: A 2026 Snapshot of Local Law 11 Risk Across 16,858 Buildings
- Apr 20, 2026Applied AI
Machine-Readable Buildings: How AI Accelerates the Circular Economy in New York — and What That Means Everywhere Else
- Apr 19, 2026Material Metabolism
Building Prosperity in New York: The Circular-Economy Case for the Built Environment
- Apr 2026Building Stewardship
Building Half-Life: The True Economic Lifespan of New York Structures
Director of Research
Jeremy Edwards
Founder of Aedifice, a research and products company for the built environment. Stewarded the facade restoration of the Woolworth Building through FacadeMD, covered by The Architect’s Newspaper. Writes at the intersection of practice and policy.