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; and myself. Along with providing useful overviews of resilient design and how it differs by location and building type, we even get into how metal affects the resilience of a building—it is a magazine on metal buildings, after all! (I noted that metal is beneficial in certain respects, but can make it harder to achieve resilience relative to maintaining livable conditions in a building that loses power, unless the thermal bridging through metal framing is addressed.)

Anyway, the discussion is worth a read. I was pleased to see that two of the other participants mentioned the role RDI is playing in this design field.

Here’s a link to the article: http://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/magazine-features/resilient-design-roundtable.aspx

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.