During a visit to India in early 2016, I noticed that the way people dealt with interruptions had changed but that they were not any closer to having a continuous 24/7 supply of water and electricity.
A Bold Idea for Addressing Sea Level Rise
On Church Street, starting in July 1868, using more than 150,000 cubic yards of fill, the City of Boston elevated 296 brick buildings by as much as 14 feet; the work was virtually completed by October 1869—ahead of schedule and under budget.
Putting “Thermal Resilience” in the LEED Pilot Credits to the Test
With this test, we want to get something out there so that experts could weigh in in this key aspect of resilience.
2015 the Warmest Year on Record by a Large Margin
Not only was 2015 the warmest year on record, but the margin of that record over the previous warmest (2014) was the largest ever.
GreenBiz on Resilience and the Future of Building Design
GreenBiz, which for years has reported on the intersection between business and the environment, posted an article today making the case that resilience will be an important driver of building design in the years ahead. The article, How Resilience Will Shape the Future of Building Design, by Molly Miller, uses
Making Multifamily Affordable Housing More Resilient
We all know that it’s more challenging to make existing buildings energy efficient or resilient than it is to achieve those goals with new construction. Because of the preponderance of existing buildings, though, this is where the heavy lifting needs to happen. A large majority of our existing buildings in
The Brock Environmental Center: A Pinnacle of Sustainability—and Resilience
When Hurricane Joaquin affected the East Coast the first week of October, the two wind turbines generated nearly a month’s worth of electricity in just five days.
LEED Pilot Credits on Resilient Design Adopted!
With the approval of these credits, there is now a mechanism in place for specifying in a building project that a broad array of resilience features will be addressed.
Hot day in Vermont
How could climate scientists be so confident, I wondered, in predicting that 2015 would be the warmest year on record, since we were only three-quarters through the year?
My Resilient Design Course at BAC starts next week
For the past several years, I’ve been teaching the online course, Resilient Design, through Boston Architectural College (BAC). The eight-week course runs from October 26 through December 18, 2015 and is limited to 15 students. It’s a great opportunity to dig into the issues of resilience at both a building
It’s Not Easy Eating Only Local Food
A more resilient food system has more distributed food production, with greater availability of locally grown and locally processed foods.
A novel product to protect water heaters and other equipment from flood damage
Little Falls, New Jersey resident Sean Mathews has developed a low-cost solution for protecting equipment from flood damage, and he wants to see more homeowners have access to it.
In an Age of Climate Change, Passive Cooling Won’t be Enough
We should continue to strive for buildings that don’t require mechanical cooling—which usually means starting with an exceptionally well-insulated building envelope—but we need to be realistic also by providing for mechanical cooling.
By Alex Wilson
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Fundamentals of Resilient Design: Dry Floodproofing
While implementing various measures to keep floodwater out of a building may seem like a no-brainer, there are actually some very significant limitations and risks.
An excellent article on the subsidies that support growing cotton in Arizona
To understand how federal policies that support the woefully unsustainable cotton farming in the Arizona desert, take a look at this ProPublica article, Holy Crop: How Federal Dollars are Financing the Water Crisis in the West, by Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam. Four years ago, when I took a sabbatical
