Why climate resiliency starts with how tomorrow’s architects are trained

Historic flooding in places as far apart as eastern Kentucky in the United States and Sindh Province in Pakistan. Scorching heat waves triggering record wild fires in Europe, western U.S. states, and Brazil. These are only recent instances of extreme weather events that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tracks as indicators of climate change.

For many people who think about the future of the built environment, the conversation about climate change is evolving fast. They are not only looking for strategies to mitigate the predicted impacts of climate change but also ways to adapt to those that are already being felt. This isn’t pessimism, but realism tinged with urgency; buildings and infrastructure require immense effort and time to update or build new.   

Hot buildings

Most of the homes, schools, offices, and other buildings we use today were not made with climate change in mind, which poses a big risk that they will not provide safe shelter in the aftermath of a weather-related disaster. Seth Holmes (pictured below) is an associate professor of architecture at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability (GIS) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He wants to find practical ways for architectural professionals to use this fact as a starting point when they begin new projects.

Holmes points to “glass boxes” as an example of buildings that do not handle heat well. A popular style in recent decades, their all-glass-exteriors mean that they capture the sun’s heat the same way greenhouses do; cooling them takes a lot of energy. If a blackout knocks out power for air-conditioning, then even a moderately sunny day can be enough to make a glass-box tower—whose windows typically can’t be opened—unbearably hot.

Glass boxes may be uniquely heat-prone, but it signals a worrying trend. A rise in temperatures in a region that historically has not experienced very hot summers can make its building stock unfit for habitation almost instantly. In 2003, a heat wave in France led to nearly 15,000 deaths; people in buildings without air-conditioning suffered dehydration, hypothermia, and heat stroke.

Holmes’s research looks to help architects better predict how an existing or new building will behave under different heat conditions. Heat analysis methods not only help them avoid raising more glass boxes, but also opens them to “passive” methods for keeping older infrastructure cooler. A passive design choice is one that doesn’t require additional technology, mechanisms, or energy use to create a benefit—it leverages what’s already there, as in the example below.

Resiliency vs. sustainability  

Climate resilience is an idea that challenges some long-held assumptions about sustainability, according to Martha Bohm, an associate professor for academic affairs at University at Buffalo. Bohm is concerned that “resiliency” is too often used interchangeably with “sustainability” in planning policies addressing climate and the built environment.

“Concepts of sustainability and resilience are different enough that they could in fact be at odds with each other,” she wrote in a study that analyzed how the concepts were treated in a climate and environmental justice plan developed by New York City Mayor’s office in 2015.

Bohm uses two categories to describe how city planners use the concept of resiliency: engineering and ecological. Engineering resilience measures the time it takes for a system—mechanical, economic, or structural—to return to its original state after it has been disturbed (the quicker, the better). Ecological resilience describes how a biological system—like a forest or sea—achieves equilibrium after a disturbance.

The critical difference between the two is that ecological resilience, unlike the engineering version, does not necessarily mean that a system returns to exactly how it was before a disruption. Equilibrium may return, but through a different matrix of balances and relationships.

“Things are most resilient when they are just starting, or are under construction, but people don’t want to live in a perpetual construction site,” Bohm wrote. “Hence, a city, like an ecosystem, becomes more complex and rigid until it either adjusts or collapses.”

Bohm is among nearly 30 researchers and practitioners featured in a 2021 book, Climate Adaptation and Resilience across Scales: From Buildings to Cities, that was co-edited by Holmes and Nicholas Rajkovich, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning.

Climate adaptation and resilience

As Bohm suggests, words matter when it comes to how decision-makers like planners and architects talk about creating a more resilient built environment. Holmes and Rajkovich’s edited volume is a tool that architectural professionals can use to lead conversations about climate resiliency. It takes the concept from theory to practice, bringing together a diversity of research to set the stage for building practical methods and tools that architects, builders, city planners, and others can apply in their professions.

The book draws attention to the gap in data that planners and architects have at their disposal to model climate impacts at different scales, from individual buildings to neighborhoods, cities, regions, and even North America as a whole. Case studies are used to show how such measurements might be made and evaluated.

A series of interviews are collected in the book that document how 15 different architectural professionals have applied resiliency in actual projects. Practical pointers are found throughout that touch topics including financing, public health, community outreach, and technical considerations.

Notably, Holmes and Rajkovich designed the book with an understanding that, for climate resiliency to work, attention needs to be given not only to individual buildings, but to the communities that surround them.

Hacking the conversation

“The job of architecture as a career is that you are this juggler. From client needs to regulations to cost-control to scheduling construction,” Holmes said. “My goal is to show students how to juggle with climate resiliency in mind as well.”

Holmes’s research very much informs how he trains the students in RIT’s master of architecture (M.Arch.) program. He hopes to ground his students in systems-thinking, approaching buildings not as a single structure “that gets built,” but as a place with a long lifespan and many purposes. He encourages them to think about what will happen to the building when it’s ten or fifty years old, or what it will take to actually maintain the building (heating, elevators, plumbing, etc.).

“If we want climate resiliency to be the standard and not the exception for the built environment, then it has to be something future architects learn from day one,” he said.

Each day we use architecture—houses, stores, schools, offices, and much else—that were the result of the thinking and work that architects do. And while landmark projects like the Sydney Opera House or the Shard in London evoke the aura of the “famous architect,” the most important buildings from a climate perspective are the most mundane ones found in cities and towns across the globe.

“Architects lead conversations that really matter because those conversations become actual places,” Holmes has observed. And, for him and many architects like him, this applies as much to a glitzy corporate headquarters as it does to a small, local market.