By The RDI’s Alex Wilson spoke at a recent forum in Boston called “Building a Resilient City: Preparing Our Buildings for Climate Change,” sponsored by A Better City. From the report on the forum in EcoRInews: Alex Wilson, president of Resilient Design Institute and executive editor of Environmental Building News, suggested other
Architecture for Humanity
Here’s word of another conference taking up the resiliency theme: On November 7-9th, 2013, your favorite humanitarian design and resiliency conference presented by Architecture for Humanity is back for another round of innovative panel discussions, workshops, Design Open Mic, and inspiring dose of industry networking. This year’s theme, Designing for a More
Two major resilient design events
This one will feature RDI’s Alex Wilson as a panelist: a discussion at the United Nations entitled Resilient Design for Sustainable Urbanization — Friday, October 4. Info here. And, on Thursday in Boston: Building A Resilient City: Preparing Our Buildings for Climate Change, the second event in A Better City’s “Building A
100 Resilient Cities
NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Today, during the opening plenary of the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, President Bill Clinton announced a global Commitment to Action to the 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge. The Commitment to Action, led by The Rockefeller Foundation and shared by Swiss Re, the American
The geometry of resilience
A challenging, but very smart read: Part 4 of the series “Toward Resilient Architectures” by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros, over at Metropolis Magazine. (See our previous mention of the series.) The authors explain four characteristics of resilience as expressed in design: differentiation, web-networks, fractal scaling, and boundary groupings. Many building
Resilient Rockaway competition finalists named
Four finalists and six honorable mentions have been named in FARROC — For a Resilient Rockaway Competition — which we reported on here in May. The finalists hail from New York, Toronto, London and Stockholm. The teams and their designs are listed here, and the competition entries may be explored
Toward a more resilient Rockaway
With some assistance from RDI’s own Alex Wilson, the New York Department of Housing, Preservation & Development, the Bluestone Organization, and others are presenting a competition called “For a Resilient Rockaway,” or FARROC, for short, which is looking for “ideas for resilient development, strategies for high-performance sustainable infrastructure, and appropriate
It Ain’t Necessarily So
Korky Koroluk, columnist for the Daily Commercial News, explores the contradictory effects that can result from energy-efficiency retrofits. It has been persuasively argued by some that adding more efficient energy systems tends to reduce the amount of energy used, thus lowering over-all energy costs. But that, it is argued, tends
How biology informs resilient design
We’ve just come across a very thoughtful article by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros called “Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons” in MetropolisMag. Mehaffy and Salingaros draw a number of lessons from biological systems and use them to draw conclusions about how resilient human systems must be designed. Here’s what they
Wilson featured on Building Capacity Blog
RDI’s Alex Wilson (who is speaking tomorrow at the GAF Commercial Partners in Growth conference in Nashville), was interviewed recently by Building Capacity Blog. Here’s a link, and here’s a snippet, in which he responds to the question of whether sustainable building and resilience may sometimes be in conflict: I
Resilient design for hospitality spaces
RDI and resilient design are being mentioned even in unlikely places, such as this mention at Boutique Design in the context of designing hotels and other hospitality spaces. It underscores our conviction that resilience to climate change and other environmental challenges should be built into any new building or retrofit.
Interview with Alex
Sustainable Industries has posted this interview with RDI’s Alex Wilson. From the interview: The biggest challenge we face in trying to make our buildings more resilient is to dramatically improve the energy performance of existing homes. That’s a huge challenge. It will require innovative outboard insulation systems, high-performance window treatments,
NYC sustainability advocate blogs about Alex Wilson
Alex was in New York for meeting of the Municipal Art Society about preparing the city for future emergencies like Hurricane Sandy. Here’s an excellent summary by Dan Miner, who blogs at BeyondOilNYC. The historical data is showing huge increases in intense storm events, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. With our
RDI’s Alex Wilson interviewed by Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune’s Mary Umberger spoke with RDI’s Alex Wilson about how builders can make homes much more disaster resistant — and how his thinking shifted from “passive survivability” to “resilience.” Generally, I think the building industry is starting to pay attention. It’s a tricky issue for builders, because it
