By 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
Views on resilient design by some leading architects
There’s a nice discussion about resilient design in Metal Architecture magazine that was just posted. It features Robin Guenther, FAIA of Perkins + Will; Greg Mella, FAIA of SmithGroup; Robin Minnery, the new staff leader on resilience issues at the American Institute of Architects; Jeffrey Dugan, AIA of Dattner Architects;
RDI and our “resilient home” profiled in The Guardian
“I want even climate change deniers to boost the energy performance of their homes. Doing so will keep their families safer during power outages and other disturbances, and it will benefit all of us,” Alex explains.
AAAS Speaks Out on Climate Change
Cover of the March 2014 AAAS report, What We Know A paper by the American Association for the Advancement of Science provides a superb, highly concise, summary of where we stand and what we can do about climate change Being a writer myself—and one who likes to convey complex concepts
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
San Francisco Names a Chief Resilience Officer
“As CRO it will be my task to be a central point of contact for all our resiliency based plans and efforts that currently live in various departments.”
Resilient Design on the UN Agenda As It Prepares for Climate Change
The United Nations, climate change, and resilient design: a day at the U.N. World Habitat conference
By Resilience forum in Boston
The RDI’s Alex Wilson spoke at a recent forum in Boston called “Building a Resilient City: Preparing Our Buildings for Climate Change,” sponsored by A Better City. From the report on the forum in EcoRInews: Alex Wilson, president of Resilient Design Institute and executive editor of Environmental Building News, suggested other
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
RDI’s role in two recent reports
There’s a new blog from Urban Green on the reach that the NYC Buildings Resiliency Task Force report has had beyond New York City. RDI was involved with one of these new reports–for the City of Boston. You can access the Urban Green blog here, or download a PDF of
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
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
