The 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 MoreRDI’s Resilient Design Principles – Need Your Feedback
The Resilient Design Institute held a retreat of our Advisory Board in March and, among other issues, addressed how to describe resilience. Out of that discussion emerged the Resilient Design Principles, which I am posting here. Consider this a working draft that will evolve over time, but I wanted to get it posted and solicit feedback. What’s missing? Is there redundancy? How could these principles be clarified? Also included here is the working RDI definition of resilience. Any and all feedback is welcome. Either use the comments field below to post your thoughts or, if you’d prefer,...
Read MorePublic fruit trees gaining ground–in an underground sort of way
There’s a wonderful article in today’s New York Times about the subversive trend in urban agriculture to plant fruit trees in urban spaces. A loose-knit group called Fallen Fruit is planting fruit trees in the Los Angeles area–its bounty to be free for the taking. And up the coast in San Francisco, the Guerrilla Grafters are surreptitiously grafting branches of fruit-bearing trees onto ornamental trees. Even parks departments are now catching on, which portends well for an urban environment in which more of what we eat can be grown within walking distance. For more, read the...
Read MoreThe New Orleans Principles
My interest in resilience was first kindled by work I did with many others in 2005, following Hurricane Katrina. Seeing the devastation wrought on the Gulf Coast by this storm, several chapters of the U.S. Green Building Council, particularly St. Louis and Little Rock, wanted to do what they could to help out. I was invited into the process, and we organized a series of charrettes at the 2005 Greenbuild conference in Altlanta. Some 160 people participated in those charrettes, one-fifth of them from New Orleans and the greater Gulf Coast region. Out of those charrettes emerged several reports,...
Read MoreIntroducing the RDI Advisory Board
I am thrilled to introduce this eminent group of experts that comprise the Resilient Design Institute’s Advisory Board. Not only do I have the good fortune to call these individuals friends, but they are leaders in their fields: architects, engineers, professors, consultants, and environmentalists—people who are making a tremendous difference in the world of resilience and to whom we all owe an incredible debt of gratitude. Though I suspect that some of these faces will be familiar, let me introduce the group. Bob Berkebile, FAIA More than anyone else, Bob is the father of the green...
Read More2012 Temperatures – One For the Record Books
For those who have made a habit of following temperature records over the past few decades, what’s most surprising with today’s news isn’t that 2012 set a record for U.S. temperatures (that had been expected for months), but rather the extent of that record. If you go back to the beginning of systematic record-keeping for the lower-48 states in 1895 until last year, the difference between the record-low (1917) and the record-high (1998) was 4.2°F. That temperature span jumped a full degree Fahrenheit with the 2012 record temperature. The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. in...
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