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This article is one in a series looking at the influences of codes on architecture and design Earth Day may be as good an occasion as any to raise awareness of the powers of nature and what it takes to withstand them or be resilient. With the growing popularity of the term resilience, the scope of its usage becomes ever broader. The same happened to the term "sustainability." Now resilience is even bigger than sustainability. To be sustainable, architecture has to be resilient, the thinking goes.
Sociologists have begun to use the concept of social resilience, economists economical resilience, and environmentalists continue to use the environment as model for resilience, writ large. Haven't they been saying all along that humans should take lessons from nature about the resilience of what they build? That nature tells us about diversity and redundancy, which allow natural systems to "spring back" improbably after forest fires, floods, volcanoes and even storms? The below quote illustrates resilience as an "umbrella" term:
We have chosen the word "resilience" as an umbrella term for the planning and design strategies needed in order to help our cities develop the necessary capacity to meet the challenges of the future. (Resilient City.Org)
In spite of the term's fuzziness the urgency to construct resiliently continues to grow. As most scientists agree that violent weather events will become more frequent, code officials and regulatory agencies respond with..... (read all) -------------------------------------------
Klaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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