About Us - Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics

The mission of the CBPD is to fundamentally improve the quality of the built environment.

The Center

The Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD) at Carnegie Mellon University conducts research, demonstration, and teaching in building performance and diagnostics. The faculty of CBPD possesses an interdisciplinary and complementary combination of backgrounds. Its expertise ranges from professional practice, to fundamental and applied research in building physics, to advanced computer modeling and simulation capabilities.

In conjunction with ABSIC, the industry-university consortium established in 1988, the CBPD is engaged in ground breaking work that investigates the impact of advanced technology on the physical, environmental, and social settings in office buildings. The CBPD receives support from the National Science Foundation, and is designated as an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. It is the first center in the nation to focus on building industry.

Research Goals

The eight major research goals of the CBPD are:

To identify international developments in new high-performance commercial building design.
To generate concepts for new high-performance products and integrated assemblies.
To improve the processes for the delivery of high performance buildings.
To develop a highly innovative demonstration ‘laboratory' - the Intelligent Workplace.
To support state-of-the-art demonstration projects.
To improve graduate and undergraduate educational programs on systems integration for total building performance.
To increase communication and publications on advanced buildings.
To develop approaches to the Intelligent Workplace Retrofit.