The phrase "a sort of lab" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a place or environment that functions similarly to a laboratory, but may not be a traditional lab setting.
Example: "The new facility is a sort of lab where researchers can experiment with innovative technologies."
Alternatives: "a kind of lab" or "a type of lab".
The startup is pushing to make its mark in South America and Africa by creating a sort of decentralized lab system though — ideally, these clinics and mobile labs will be performing their own disease testing in the field in real-time, and uploading their results so other doctors can get a bird's-eye view of what's happening where.
Learning labs: To complement this, she's developed a sort of "learning lab" in which employees can practice directly applying the skills they've learned in a safe environment.
The Web site served as a sort of fashion lab as Ms. Rim ferreted out new designers who offered clothes at reasonable prices.
Abe was smaller, somewhat gnarled and bent (in the years that I knew him), brown and grizzled, like an old shikari, with a hoarse voice and chronic cough; he cared little what he wore, and usually had on a sort of rumpled lab smock.
It appears Witt imagined a world where all police departments and hospitals have a sort of spider lab.
According to their report, after being dosed, the test subjects "left the web, rubbed any residual drops off on the wooden frame, only returned to the web after having given their pedipalps and mouthparts a thorough cleaning, and could scarcely be persuaded to take another drop of the stuff". It appears Witt imagined a world where all police departments and hospitals have a sort of spider lab.
Fiction has many advantages over psychology as a way to explore the workings of our minds – fiction writers' freedom to imagine subjectively how people's minds and emotions work could be considered a sort of experimental psychological lab.
It's easy to scapegoat Kapoor as keeping the substance away from other artists, but really, his studio is acting as a sort of secondary science lab, where Vantablack's artistic potential can be explored by a team with the resources to do so properly.
It seems somehow appropriate that a good portion of the college-age population in Manhattan makes up a sort of walking fashion experimentation lab, where all sorts of combinations and permutations of dress can be studied.
