Evidence-based research on the built environment.

What this is

Aedifice Research is an independent research publication on the built environment — how buildings are made, kept, operated, regulated, and distributed, and what each of those costs in carbon, dollars, and lives. Evidence comes from public data, field practice, and policy. Every report is free to read. Every dataset that can legally be released is published alongside it.

Research series

Work is organised into six teams.

Material Metabolism 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 researches what extends a building's service life — durability, maintenance, preservation, retrofit economics, and adaptive reuse.

Energy & Emissions studies operational carbon, building-performance standards, and the decarbonization pathways that will or will not get the standing stock to net zero.

Applied AI researches how foundation models, agentic systems, and machine learning change the way buildings are designed, built, operated, and stewarded — and how the architects, engineers, and specialists responsible for them can integrate these tools without surrendering the professional judgment buildings require.

Policy Forensics analyses the laws that shape what gets built, preserved, and destroyed — mandates, heritage designation, zoning, and the political economy of the built environment.

Civic Equity examines how the built environment distributes wealth, carbon, and harm — and the demographics of who bears each.

Published so far

Our first publication, Building Prosperity in New York (April 2026), is a seven-chapter monograph from the Material Metabolism team — a circular-economy case study of the city's built environment. Report No. 02, Machine-Readable Buildings, is the execution layer: the AI methods that turn public building data into decision-ready structure. Further reports are in production across all six series.

Why it exists

Cities publish enormous volumes of data about their buildings — permits, violations, benchmarking, ownership transfers, zoning, evictions, health outcomes. Almost none of it is synthesised across the physical, operational, regulatory, and distributional dimensions of buildings at once. Trade press covers individual projects. Academia publishes after long lag. Policy operates without synthesis. Aedifice Research sits in that gap.

Authorship and independence

Research is directed by Jeremy Edwards, founder of Aedifice — a research and products company for the built environment — and a participant in the 2025 facade restoration of the Woolworth Building, covered by The Architect's Newspaper (November 2025).

Aedifice Research is the research publication of Aedifice, the operating company. Editorial control, research agenda, and publication decisions rest with the director. The commercial side of the company does not review or approve reports prior to publication. Every report names its authors and external reviewers.

Scope

Work is published primarily on New York City's public data infrastructure — among the deepest municipal open-data portals in the world. Methods generalise to any jurisdiction with parcel-level building records; future reports will extend to other cities as the data supports it. We do not publish speculative comparative claims ahead of evidence.

Openness and reproducibility

Every report carries a data appendix. Where the originating agency's license permits, the raw enriched dataset and analysis code are released with the report. Our standard: any careful reader with intermediate data skills must be able to reproduce our headline numbers in one afternoon, from the primary sources, on a laptop.

Corrections

Errors will happen. When they do, we publish a dated correction at the top of the affected report with a one-line description and a link to the revised file. Substantive errors that change a headline finding trigger a retraction note rather than a silent edit.

Funding

Aedifice Research is currently self-funded by Aedifice, the operating company. No report is commissioned, sponsored, or pre-reviewed by third parties. Any future outside funding will be disclosed per report.

Cadence

We commit to one flagship report per quarter and one multi-chapter book per calendar year. Shorter working-paper briefs appear between flagships.

Contribute

If you have a dataset, a correction, or lived practitioner context that would improve a report, write us. The best work on this subject has always been a conversation between data and building.

Contact

Press, policy, academic, and partnership inquiries: jeremy@aedificeai.com.