Was the city more or less one big giant science laboratory?

[Novus]

I watched this series several times over and I don't see any other areas of the city that were made without the sole purpose of researching something?

Anything the Atlantis Expedition from Earth had for leisure I think was made out of their own initiative. The Ancients never struck me as the kind of race that believed in downtime. Ever.

[garhkal]

The outer piers. Sure. The inner city looked like lots of storage and quarters..

[Mnikolic]

Atlantis is a spaceship. Not just a city, a spaceship. And what do you have on a spaceship? Labs. Lots of labs. But of course, even scientists and military need to rest, so there were sleeping quarters too.

So yes, Atlantis is basically one huge-*** laboratory with space, interplanetary and time travel abilities where scientists pull very important solutions for their problems out of their behinds in the very last second. The same thing is with Destiny, the only difference between the two is that the latter is a dedicated spaceship and not also a city.