About State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science

State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science

The State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science at South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou is China's national laboratory for architecture in hot, humid climates. It studies how buildings and cities in the subtropics can be designed, built and operated to be comfortable, energy-saving, durable and resilient. The laboratory is listed here under its classic name. In the 2022–23 national laboratory reorganisation it was rebuilt as the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building and Urban Science, jointly on SCUT and Shenzhen University; that successor is documented in this profile to prevent double-listing. This profile is fenced to the laboratory itself.

Roots in 1950s subtropical architecture research

The laboratory's intellectual roots lie in the subtropical architecture research of Xia Changshi and Chen Boqi in the 1950s. At SCUT — one of the Old Eight Schools in the field of architecture in Chinese universities, whose subtropical building research began early in the last century — Professors Xia Changshi, Chen Boqi and other senior scientists organised the establishment of a Subtropical Architecture Research Laboratory in the 1950s. Their insight was that the modern architecture then being transplanted into South China had been developed for other climates, and that Lingnan buildings needed their own science of shading, ventilation, heat insulation and moisture control, grounded in the region's intense sun, high humidity, heavy rain and typhoons.

Successive generations carried the work forward. Scholars of the 1960s and 1970s who had studied in Europe, the United States and Japan inherited and developed the subtropical tradition, and the school has since produced academicians including Mo Bozhi, He Jingtang and Wu Shuoxian, among six academicians associated with its architecture community, together with national engineering survey and design masters. The laboratory that eventually emerged is thus not a recent invention but the national formalisation of a seventy-year research lineage.

From ministry laboratory to state key laboratory

The formal steps are precisely recorded by the university. In 1978 the state approved the establishment of the Subtropical Building Research Laboratory of the Ministry of Education at SCUT. In 2005 the Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science of the Ministry of Education was founded. In early 2007, on that basis, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved its expansion into the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, centred on the two first-level disciplines of architecture and civil engineering and integrating acoustics, optics, transportation, environmental science and engineering, material science, information technology, urban sociology and other disciplines.

The construction plan's feasibility was confirmed in September 2007 and the construction project initiated officially in November 2007. The laboratory passed acceptance inspection in June 2010 and passed the assessments of the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2013 and 2018. For many years it was described as the only national key laboratory of its field in higher education in China — a striking fact that reflects how unusual it is for architecture, a design discipline, to sustain a state key laboratory of the kind more commonly awarded to the physical and life sciences. Its existence asserts that building science, rigorously pursued, is laboratory science.

The subtropical building problem

The laboratory's subject is defined by climate. Subtropical South China combines high temperatures, high humidity, intense solar radiation, torrential seasonal rain and destructive typhoons. Buildings there must shed heat and water, admit breeze and daylight without admitting glare and storm, resist mould, corrosion and wind damage, and do so for dense populations in some of the world's largest and fastest-growing cities. Air conditioning can brute-force comfort, but at enormous energy cost; the founding generation's alternative — climate-adaptive design that works with sun, wind and rain — is now a central strategy of low-carbon building worldwide.

Guangzhou is an ideal laboratory city for this science: a historic Lingnan metropolis in the Pearl River Delta with a deep vernacular tradition of shaded arcades, courtyards and ventilated buildings, overlaid by a modern skyline built at extraordinary speed. The laboratory studies both — extracting tested principles from traditional subtropical building and developing new technologies for contemporary construction.

Research direction one: space environment and architectural design

The laboratory's core research directions, as recorded by the university, are threefold. The first is subtropical space environment and architectural design: the theory and method of designing buildings and urban spaces for the subtropical climate, including climate-adaptive and energy-saving building design and the inheritance of Lingnan architectural culture within modern projects. This direction joins design research to history and culture, asking how contemporary buildings can remain recognisably of their place while meeting modern performance standards.

The laboratory's design credits show the direction in built form. Its teams are credited with design work including the China Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai and venues for the Olympic and Asian Games. The China Pavilion — the great red inverted-pyramid landmark of the Shanghai Expo, held through a subtropical summer — required exactly the laboratory's expertise at monumental scale: solar shading, natural ventilation strategies and crowd-scale environmental control. Such projects serve the laboratory as full-scale experiments whose performance can be studied and published, as well as as national showcases.

Research direction two: physical environment and energy efficiency

The second direction is subtropical building physical environment and building energy efficiency: the quantitative science of heat, light, sound and air in buildings. SCUT's strength in architectural acoustics and optics, integrated into the laboratory from its 2007 design, belongs here — concert halls, theatres and transport hubs in the region draw on it, as does daylighting research that balances illumination against solar heat gain. Building physics teams measure and simulate thermal comfort, ventilation, energy consumption and indoor environmental quality, producing the data and models on which design guidance and standards rest.

Energy is the urgent application. Buildings account for a large share of energy use in hot-climate cities, most of it for cooling. Research on passive cooling, high-performance envelopes, efficient systems and renewable integration, tested in Guangzhou's climate, transfers directly across the subtropical world — South and Southeast Asia, and hot-humid regions globally — giving the laboratory's work an audience far beyond Guangdong.

Research direction three: structure and disaster prevention

The third direction is subtropical building structure and disaster prevention and mitigation. Typhoons subject South China's buildings to extreme wind loads and wind-driven rain; intense rainfall tests foundations, slopes and drainage; heat and humidity accelerate corrosion of steel and degradation of concrete and masonry. Structural and materials researchers in the laboratory study wind-resistant design, durability in hot-humid and marine environments, and the resilience of buildings and infrastructure to the region's hazards.

This direction connects the laboratory to civil engineering, the second of its two founding disciplines. In recent years the laboratory reports undertaking 132 major national scientific research tasks, including national key research and development projects and major instrument development projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and winning 157 provincial and ministerial awards — a tempo of funded, assessed research that reflects the breadth of its architecture-plus-engineering constitution.

Reorganisation as the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building and Urban Science

In April 2023, under the national reorganisation of state key laboratories, the laboratory was reconstructed based on South China University of Technology and Shenzhen University and renamed the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building and Urban Science. The expanded name records an expanded brief: from buildings to buildings and cities together. The reconstructed laboratory focuses on major national strategic needs, particularly the high-quality development of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, and on scientific and technological issues including the theories and technologies for intelligent transformation, carbon reduction and resilience enhancement of subtropical buildings and cities.

Its key research tasks are recorded as coordinated development and climate adaptation of the Greater Bay Area, green building design and cultural inheritance, low-carbon structural construction and resilience improvement, and urban intelligent perception and digital drive. The continuity is clear — climate adaptation, green design and structural resilience are the classic laboratory's directions restated at urban scale — while intelligent perception and digital methods add a new instrumentarium of sensors, data and simulation for whole-city environmental management.

A Hong Kong base and the Greater Bay Area

In January 2026 the reconstructed laboratory launched a Hong Kong base with the University of Hong Kong. The University of Hong Kong and SCUT formalised the partnership through a strategic collaboration agreement to establish the Hong Kong Base of the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building and Urban Science, with a launch ceremony and plaque unveiling on 21 January 2026 attended by the presidents of both universities and the deans of their architecture schools. Hong Kong, itself a subtropical high-density city with distinguished architecture and urban research, gives the laboratory a partner and a testbed across the delta.

The two universities plan a multi-level training system from undergraduate to doctoral levels to nurture professionals in architecture and urban science. For the laboratory, the Hong Kong base extends its founding mission — a science of building for the subtropical delta — across the whole Greater Bay Area, the megalopolis whose coordinated, climate-adapted development is now its stated strategic focus.

Why this laboratory matters

Most of humanity's building growth this century will occur in hot climates, and most of its building energy problem is a cooling problem. The State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science — grown from Xia Changshi and Chen Boqi's 1950s research room through a 1978 ministry laboratory and a 2005 ministry key laboratory to state key status in 2007, acceptance in 2010, and reconstruction at urban scale in 2023 — is China's concentrated answer: a laboratory that treats climate-adaptive design, building physics and structural resilience as one science, tests it in landmark buildings from the China Pavilion to Games venues, and now applies it to the Greater Bay Area as a whole.