Designing environmental technologies that sense, learn, and evolve.
Learn moreThe Adaptive Environments Lab is a trans-disciplinary research initiative dedicated to designing places that actively promote human and ecological health amid accelerating environmental and societal change. Based at the University of Virginia, the Lab aims to bring together faculty and students from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Medicine, Public Health, Environmental Science, and Data Science to develop design methods that enable built environments to sense, learn, and evolve.
Traditional design methods rely on prediction to anticipate future conditions and build solutions. But prediction fails in complex systems when conditions change faster than infrastructure can adapt. The Lab pursues a different approach grounded in the recognition that complex systems exceed our capacity to fully model or control them. This shifts the designer's role from author to orchestrator, working alongside computational systems, ecological processes, and human communities to shape environments that evolve over time.
This work addresses a critical gap in how emerging technologies reach physical environments. Major technology companies—Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and others—are investing heavily in spatial computing, environmental AI, digital twin infrastructure, and autonomous systems. Yet translating these capabilities into methods of adaptation for physical spaces remains an open problem. The Lab develops the missing link: workflows that connect persistent sensing networks and edge computing to incremental physical interventions, including autonomous construction methods that can modify environments in response to changing conditions. As industry moves from research prototypes toward deployed systems, partnerships with applied research labs become essential for grounding computational capabilities in the complexity of real places.
Design decisions should emerge from sustained attention to how environments perform. The Lab develops sensing networks and data acquisition workflows that document conditions across scales, from corridor-wide terrain to ground-level vegetation morphology across time, capturing seasonal cycles, infrastructure changes, and the effects of interventions. Computation and machine intelligence are employed to process and represent these large-scale datasets.
Rather than large interventions that lock in assumptions, the Lab explores incremental changes that aggregate and evolve. Small adjustments informed by continuous observation aggregate into systemic transformation, working within rather than against long-term environmental trajectories.
Advanced simulation, digital twins, and machine learning offer powerful tools for understanding complex environments. But these technologies have the greatest potential when they augment rather than replace human judgment. The Lab develops methods to integrate human perspectives and management into computational frameworks, ensuring that design remains accountable to the communities and ecologies it serves.
A cross-disciplinary collaboration between Medicine and Architecture
Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine & Public Health Sciences
Director, UVA Medical Design Program
School of Medicine + School of Architecture
Trowbridge is a globally recognized researcher in built environment and health. His work has shaped how the field understands connections between physical spaces and health outcomes—strength recognized through roles including Chief Medical Officer of the International WELL Building Institute.
Commonwealth Professor, Landscape Architecture
School of Architecture
Cantrell is a leading figure in computational design education. His research explores how digital tools can represent, simulate, and reshape how we engage environmental systems—work spanning major river corridors and internationally recognized digital twin initiatives.
The Adaptive Environments Lab is based in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, with cross-school reach into Medicine, Public Health, and Environmental Science.
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Campbell Hall, School of Architecture, University of Virginia