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 Boston report, Building Resiliency in Boston, directly. Also, if you haven’t had a chance to look at the NYC report itself, I’d encourage you to take a look at both the summary report and a more detailed report with descriptions of each of the proposals coming out of the Task Force. You can view or...
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 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 MoreThe New York City Buildings Resiliency Task Force Presents Recommendations
The report just released by the Buildings Resiliency Task Force presents 33 detailed recommendations for improving the resiliency of New York City buildings.
Read MoreBigger, Longer Heat Storms Are Coming Soon: Will Your Building Keep Its Cool?
Editor’s note: Tom Phillips and I have been corresponding about the risks of temperature extremes, and I invited him to put together an article on the topic so that others could benefit from his research. I am posting that here. -Alex Wilson Floods and ice storms cause some the biggest economic losses in the US, but heat storms are the leading cause of death over the last 10 years among weather events in the US. Heat storms cause 1500 to 2000 deaths per year in the US. This number is projected to double or triple in the coming decades, and it will increase in a nonlinear fashion. The...
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