Built buildings are complicated. That’s why we’re a public-benefit lab.

Built Buildings Lab prioritizes projects advancing public access to knowledge of existing buildings and the unique roles they play in our lives.

Our expert team creates actionable insight through a sleuthing and tinkering mindset, investigating the buildings that underpin neighborhoods, campuses, and cities.

Our work supports community-based organizations, building owners, city governments, and practitioners actively integrating existing buildings into short- and long-term sustainability planning, policy-making, and cultural heritage practices.

No two buildings are alike! Built Buildings Lab tailors its approach to each circumstance, utilizing an evolving set of techniques to unlock the value of existing buildings.

Understand built buildings through dialogue and reflection.

Map and survey building stakeholders

Identify the barriers and opportunities to reusing and adapting existing buildings

Create and facilitate strategic and sustainability planning workshops

Collect, disseminate and diagram cases of building use, reuse, and adaptation

Plan for the care of built buildings.

Implement holistic, multi-criteria assessments

Model policy and standards for decarbonization and resilience

Use scenario planning to evaluate the outcomes of deferred maintenance, building deconstruction, salvage and reuse

Develop and visualize implementation roadmaps for managing existing building goals

Make knowledge about built buildings.

Estimate the avoided, embodied and whole-life carbon of building reuse

Model the life cycle impacts of new, existing, and demolished buildings

Map the materials flows of salvaged and reused building elements

Model building- and city-scale climate adaptation and resilience potential

Develop original indicator sets for evaluating building reuse outcomes

Perform co-benefits assessments to link climate, cultural, social, and economic outcomes.

Enhance your organization’s ability to assess built buildings.

Conceptualize calculators, tools and applications

Improve literacy on whole-life carbon estimation and life cycle assessment

Teach building reuse and heritage-informed decarbonization advocacy

Document organization-specific reuse guidelines and decision-making criteria