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 projects of the last century, ranging from glass skyscrapers to the “ghost cities” of China fail the resilience test because they lack most or all of these characteristics. On the other hand, the authors attribute the survival structures like Spain’s Alhambra to their incorporation of all of these geometric principles. Other examples would include organically developed towns, often with lots of vernacular architecture.

The authors conclude:

For civilization, and quite possibly, for life on earth to survive, designers will have to embrace a far more robust environmental geometry: The Geometry of Resilience. This is an important component of the necessary transition ahead: the careful, adaptive re-structuring of our technology, and our global economy, to achieve a much more resilient, more survivable form of human development.

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.