The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell. Little Brown & Company, New York, 2023. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2023. As I write this, a massive heat dome is
The Life and Times of a Lifeline: A Further Look at Resilience and Sustainability
The reality is that past history and data on extremes have limited relevance to future possibilities as climate change produces events that are more frequent and intense.
The Cascading Impacts of Drought and the Role Resilience Must Play
We need to examine where we build, how we build, and how to protect existing buildings and infrastructure.
By Building Resilience 2019: How Cleveland is Leading the Way in Planning for Climate Change
“We designed our way into this problem, we can design our way out.”
– Mark Chambers, Chief Sustainability Officer of New York City, at Building Resilience 2019
By Alex Wilson
Alex Wilson/Front page slider/Fundamentals of Resilient Design/News & Blogs/Uncategorized
Fundamentals of Resilient Design: Designing Homes for Wildfire Resilience
Guidance for building and managing houses in sites vulnerable to wildfire
Building Resilience 2019 Conference website live
For over a year the International Living Future Institute, the Resilient Design Institute, and BuildingGreen, Inc. have been working together to organize a national conference to address resilience in the built environment. Building Resilience 2019 will be held November 7-8, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio, and it will bring together architects,
By RDI’s Tiny House Village Design Charrette
On 6/25/2018, we held a design charrette to explore what are optimal designs for building cold-climate resilient sleeping pods with a central common building in a tiny house village?
Why Tiny House Villages, and Why Now?
The tiny house movement and tiny village model provide a new, modular option for people from a wide range of backgrounds to consider, and a new way to plan clustered development.
“Ready for Anything” article in Custom Builder
Custom Builder Magazine’s current issue has a good overview of resilience measures that can be incorporated into new custom homes. The article, “Ready for Anything,” describes how a half-dozen builders are addressing resilient design in their respective climates. Near the end of the article, my own system that allows me
Special issue of BRI on Overheating in Buildings
When I was at the PLEA 2017 Conference (Passive Low-Energy Architecture) in Scotland a few weeks ago, I learned that the contents of a special issue of the journal, Building Research & Information on Overheating in Buildings are available free through the end of July. BRI is a peer-reviewed, technical
Surviving the Apocalypse vs. Heading it Off
The trend of the wealthy to make provisions to protect only their immediate families will ultimately fail if the only beneficiaries are themselves and not the larger society.
My Resilient Design course at BAC starts soon
The online course, Resilient Design, that I’ve been teaching once or twice a year for the past three years, starts on January 17th. It’s an eight-week, graduate-level course that addresses key topics of resilient design, including vulnerabilities to storms and other natural disasters, and strategies for enhancing the resilience of
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.
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
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.
