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 Resilient City” series. Alex will be speaking at this event also. Info...
Read More100 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 Institute of Architects (AIA), Architecture for Humanity, and Palantir, will support at least 100 cities to hire a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), create a resilience strategy, and provide access to tools, technical support, and resources for...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreResilient 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 by clicking through the illustrations on that...
Read MoreA great post on lack of resilience in glass towers
Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger.com posted a great blog on glass towers and their lack of resilience. There’s been quite a building boom in Toronto, and residents of those new heavily glazed high-rise buildings will be in serious trouble should there be an extended power outage. You can read the blog here.
Read MoreToward 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 and responsive programming for the site” — the site being “Arverne East, an 80+ acre site located in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area Zone A section of the Rockaways that experienced...
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