Resilient Homes Online Design Aide: Connecting Research and Practice for Socially Resilient Communities

Resilience in architectural research, discourse, and practice tends to focus on physical aspects of the built environment. Much of the discussion within this technological domain of resilience resolves around singular, unique, and high value facilities: ignoring the vast fabric of buildings where most people live. However, studies in socioecological resilience suggests that resilience in the built environment must address people and systems, not merely property. Transitioning to this focus will both require and result in broadening architecture’s interest and influence beyond the normal physical boundaries of the built environment. To effectively engage this broader scope, new tools must enable new modes of public outreach, information sharing, data analysis, decision support, and ultimately create new knowledge. This paper describes the motivation, development, and preliminary findings of one such tool, the Resilient Home Online Design Aide (RHOnDA). This results suggest a cycle of participatory architectural research to advance socioecological resilience.

When Performance Informs Design

It is clear that building energy performance plays an essential role in architecture and in architectural practice, not only for reasons of occupant comfort and energy efficiency but also for minimal code compliance. While achieving energy compliance is essential and even laudable, our current definition of “building performance” is somewhat limited. Energy performance analyses are often performed solely for code compliance with a minimal feedback loop during the design process. In the instances when analyses are completed as part of design, a growing array of simulation tools allow designers to make more informed decisions during the design process. There is tremendous potential in this trajectory.

DATAField Strategies for Technological RESILIENCE through URBAN PROTOTYPING

The leveraging of digital technologies at the intersection of architecture and urbanism allows for imagining scenarios for the future of cities. In line with recent cross-disciplinary research, this paper aims at investigating how large-scale prototyping applied to urban space can generate impact and provide a working model for Resilient Strategies. DATAField, a placemaking intervention developed in New Orleans, investigates how the synthetic integration of ‘the making’ of place, the importance of citizens’ engagement and the incorporation of digital technologies can provide an operative framework for large scale urban prototyping. Introducing models for urban hydrology management, citizen-engaged science, visualization strategies of underlying infrastructural systems and resultant urban prototyping related to resiliency, DATAField demonstrates how digital technologies implemented through systemic approaches can be a powerful tool to design in soft-land and to strengthen citizens’ awareness of ‘how we can live with water’ in vulnerable ecosystems.

Adaptive Architecture: Towards Resiliency in the Built Environment

This paper discusses possibilities afforded by an integrative approach in which overlapping of intelligence, material capabilities, and social and ecological issues inspires an entirely new approach to designing resilience through adaptability. The ability to regulate behavior and adapt to the demands of a situation has always been associated with living organisms. This capacity to adapt is what defines resilience in nature. A technologically augmented built environment can often adapt to changes in its environment, but this adaptivity is often prescribed. If resilience is the capacity to recover from a disturbance and a traumatic event, how is then resilience manifested within a technologically enhanced setting? How do we design resilience into our engineered ecologies? How is this manifested in the design context where boundary between self developing and externally designed is increasingly blurred?

The Warming Hive: Building Community, One Inflation at a Time

Is it possible for an architectural space that can be used by anyone, to happen anywhere, anytime? This paper explores how pneumatic (a.k.a. inflatable) architecture can be deployed to address social resilience on a multiplicity of levels. Focusing on The Warming Hive—a recently completed pneumatic enclosure designed by architecture students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—this study challenges a common misconception that social resilience in architecture is limited to disaster relief. As evidenced by The Warming Hive, pneumatic architecture can generate new forms of social resilience, whereby communities are built though social engagement, one inflation at a time.

About Our Theme - Design and Resilience

The working definition referenced above is the thread that we used to tie together the content of four sessions and frame discourse at the 2018 AIA Intersections Symposium on Design and Resilience. Three separate, but related, contextual frameworks- Technological, Ecological, and Sociological - provided a platform for a fourth discussion that addressed synthesis and action. Offered as part of the 2018 AIA Conference on Architecture and curated in collaboration with a cohort of moderators, this format represents a radical departure from previous Intersections Symposia. With an articulated mission of bridging the gaps that exists in education, research and practice, the Intersections Symposium is a joint venture between the AIA and ACSA. The move to construct the 2018 symposium as a constellation of sessions delivered throughout the programming of the AIA Conference promised to broaden discourse and make a forum more accessible to the voices who will reinforce the connections between practice and the academy.

Rhizolith Island: Prototyping a Resilient Coastal Infrastructure

Rhizolith Island is a proof of concept design project that investigates floating, high performance concrete structures as a new, resilient coastal infrastructure that revitalizes depleting mangrove forests along vulnerable shorelines with continual flooding. The project is a collaboration between the authors, CEMEX Global R&D in Biel, Switzerland, JJSmithGroup Coastal Engineering, governmental agencies of Cartagena, Colombia, and local NGOs. The project uses new high performance and lightweight concrete technology to strengthen ecological performance of coastal infrastructure and reinforces appreciation for the ecologies that surround and protect communities. As a new, protective infrastructural type, the island is a resilient barrier that protects and enables new mangroves to grow and thrive while creating a public edge for visitors to engage with along the shore.