By 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.
By My Resilient Design course at BAC starts up soon
For the past two years, I’ve been teaching the online course, Resilient Design, through Boston Architectural College (BAC). The eight-week course runs from March 23 to May 16, 2015 and is limited to 15 students. It’s a great opportunity to dig into the issue of resilience at both a building
BAC course on Resilient Design
Alex Wilson taught an online, eight-week course, Resilient Design, at Boston Architectural College (BAC) January – March, 2014. This course will be offered at least annually through BAC’s Sustainable Design Institute, and it can be taken either as part of their continuing education program or one of their degree programs.
By 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
RDI’s Resilient Design Principles – Need Your Feedback
The Resilient Design Institute held a retreat of our Advisory Board in March and, among other issues, addressed how to describe resilience. Out of that discussion emerged the Resilient Design Principles, which I am posting here. Consider this a working draft that will evolve over time, but I wanted to
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
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
By 2012 CERES Insurance Industry Study: Progress Slow, Urgently Needed
Climate-change-related disasters threaten industry profitability, and may drive less-prepared companies from a variety of asset and risk classes. A reduction in the availability and affordability of insurance and risk management services can threaten the economy…
By Brattleboro event: Lessons from Germany’s Energy Transition
In 2000 Germany set a goal of achieving 20 percent renewable electricity production by 2020. At that time they were at 3 percent. Now, just 12 years later, they are already at 25 percent. How is Germany transitioning to a renewable energy economy so quickly? Long-time renewable energy advocate Bob
Alex presenting at an all-day workshop on resilient design in Boston
I’m one of four presenters at an all-day workshop, “Skills for Building Resilient Communities,” on Tuesday, March 5th, immediately preceding the NESEA Building Energy Conference in Boston. The other presenters are architect Dan Watson, FAIA (author of the recently published book, Design for Flooding: Architecture, Landscape and Urban Design for
Alex speaking at the Sustainable Cities Roundtable – Kirkland, WA
Alex will be presenting (via teleconference) at the Sustainable Cities Roundtable this Thursday, January 10th, from 12:00 noon to 1:30 Pacific Time, in Kirkland, Washington. From the website: King County GreenTools has pulled together an exciting lineup to launch the 2013 Sustainable Cities Roundtable Series theme: “Beyond Net Zero: Resilience,
