By The July-August issue of the magazine Green Building & Design has a heavy focus on resilience. This link to the online edition will take you to the issue; the resilience feature starts on page 55, and I’m featured starting on page 62.
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
By Resilient Design: Not as mainstream as we’d like
As part of its monthly tracking how the architectural firms are faring, in its latest survey the American Institute of Architects queried members about their resilient design practices. Since “resilient design” is a concept that’s not yet the kind of household word that “sustainability” has become, we’re encouraged at the number
The Resilience Imperative in Canada
Adam Auer, the Director of Sustainability for the Cement Association of Canada, has just posted an excellent article, “The Resilience Imperative,” in ReNEW Canada: The Infrastructure Magazine. Adam interviewed me when he was writing the article, and I think he’s done an excellent job at capturing the salient issues. Even
Adaptation Stories
In collecting photos to use in the Resilient Design course I’m teaching right now at BAC, I came across a wonderful blog, Adaptation Stories, that’s worth spending some time with. Two young women, Allie Goldstein and Kirsten Howard, who had just completed their Masters studies at the University of Michigan’s
By 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
A great post on lack of resilience in glass towers
Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger.com posted a great blog on glass towers and their lack of resilience. There’s been quite a building boom in Toronto, and residents of those new heavily glazed high-rise buildings will be in serious trouble should there be an extended power outage. You can read the blog
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
Public fruit trees gaining ground–in an underground sort of way
There’s a wonderful article in today’s New York Times about the subversive trend in urban agriculture to plant fruit trees in urban spaces. A loose-knit group called Fallen Fruit is planting fruit trees in the Los Angeles area–its bounty to be free for the taking. And up the coast in
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
