We develop scalable context-responsive solutions to address the pressing challenges of urban inequality, climate change and environmental degradation across cities in the Indo-Pacific.

Monash Urban Lab focuses on how we can reset, repair and reimagine our relationship with the built environment through architecture and urban planning.

Future Building Initiative works with industry and government stakeholders to explore better building practices and built form outcomes.

The Afterlives of Cities research cluster focuses on research into the roles of imagination and play in collaboratively conceptualising and realising a future built environment. The core research team includes expertise in architecture, digital fabrication, and art installation. Their approach to working together encompasses a range of activities that sit alongside more traditional architectural practices, highlighting concern for the historical, cultural, and technological landscape as it re-composes urban experience. Their projects in this investigate and reaffirm the ethical role of play in civic creative practice through ‘making together’: that is, via community-led engagement in material reuse, participatory workshops, and creative outputs. These ongoing endeavours constitute a parallel discussion to futures can be made in juxtaposition with an increasingly urbanised world.

The Art/Architecture Intersections research cluster brings together practitioners and scholars working at the intersection of architecture, art, design and other creative disciplines. It supports expanded and emerging forms of practice that move beyond architecture as the design of buildings, embracing collaborative, relational, and experimental approaches to making, thinking, and teaching. Conceived as a conduit between existing labs and departments, the cluster connects critical scholarship, curatorial practices, discursive formats, and creative research with a public reach. It provides a shared framework for work that often operates across, or in excess of, established disciplinary structures – linking practice and theory, and traditional and non-traditional research.

Monash Art, Design and Architecture is a Global Research Partner of the Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN), advancing climate mitigation and adaptation policy and practice in rapidly urbanising countries. Monash researchers collaborate with international partners across Australia, India, Indonesia, China and Africa on action-research and knowledge exchange initiatives. Through co-designed research and stakeholder engagement, projects identify locally specific policy challenges and develop contextualised methods for data collection and analysis. This adaptive approach translates research into evidence-based pathways for strengthening and implementing building climate policies. Current projects include Policy Action for Decarbonising Buildings in Asia; the Solutions Lab for low-carbon transitions; the Net-Zero Precincts Living Lab (Melbourne); the UNFCCC Buildings Breakthrough Agenda and Common Carbon Metric (Kenya); the UNEP Global Status Report; and the Climate Safe Schools Program.