Resilient Design Guidelines – Climate Ready DC

The Resilient Design Institute, collaborating with Mary Ann Lazarus, FAIA, of MALeco in St. Louis, Candace Pearson, of BuildingGreen in Brattleboro, and the Wood Group in Portland, Maine, wrote Washington, DC’s Resilient Design Guidelines. Completed in 2020, these Guidelines were developed for Washington, DC’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) as part of the City’s Climate Ready DC program. Alex Wilson led this effort and was the primary author of much of the document.

The Guidelines focus on two climate-related vulnerabilities facing the City—flooding, exacerbated by sea level rise, and extreme heat—with an additional focus on power outages, which can be caused by a wide range of natural and anthropogenic disasters. Included are three primary sections: Understanding Vulnerabilities in the District; Applying Resilience in the District; and Resilient Design Strategies.

The primary target audience of the Resilient Design Guidelines is municipal officials involved with schools and other municipal facilities in the District—and design firms involved with those projects. The Guidelines were written, however, to also serve a broader audience of developers and designers of any facility in the District.

If your city or community is interested in developing a set of resilient design strategies, please reach out to alex@resilientdesign.org .

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David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.