California’s Continuing Water Woes Call for Creative Solutions
“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” -Jay Famiglietti, Ph.D., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Read MoreEngineering Our Way Out of Global Warming: Is Climate Intervention a Global Warming Solution That Republicans Will Get Behind?
I am all for carbon-capture—both the research needed to better understand it and the implementation of strategies that employ it. But albedo modification (enhanced solar reflectivity) is a different story.
Read MoreViews 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...
Read MoreHow to Make a Hospital Resilient: A Tour of Spaulding Rehab
Spaulding Rehab hospital in Charlestown, MA is designed and built to provide for sheltering in place. A key part of this strategy is the inclusion of screened, operable windows in patient rooms, lounges, offices, and other spaces.
Read MoreSearching for Optimism in an Age of Climate Change
What inspired me to launch an organization to promote these and other aspects of resilient design, was the recognition that the safety aspects of these strategies might be a stronger motivation to get mainstream America on-board in achieving more sustainable, lower-carbon buildings and communities than simply “doing the right thing.”
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