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Resilient Design and Sustainability

We are more frequently being asked to design buildings for less hospitable environments. Past clients have brought sites to us that they want to live on because of the local or natural beauty, but the particular location is likely to experience disaster in the form of Tsunami, flooding, landslide, wildfire or earthquake. To provide shelter on these sites that can stand up to the local elements is what we call Resilient Design or Resiliency.

Sustainability is another term we use in reference to architecture that is similar to Resiliency, but requires a different design approach.  In Sustainability our goal is to design toward preserving natural resources or to help maintain ecological equilibrium. These concepts of Sustainability and Resiliency complement each other and can both be embedded in the design for a specific site, especially in those sites that are prone to adversity.

Whether the goal is to design a disaster-resistant dwelling or provide a building that has less impact on its environment by conserving resources and reducing pollutants, sustainable resiliency can provide a pathway to achieve this. With either approach, the building design may be considered a “High Performance” building because it will be designed to a higher level than the code requirements.  

That said, the building code in the state of Washington is one of the most progressive and provides a level of protection against the typical structural tests of wind, snow and earthquakes as well as requiring levels of insulation and air sealing that make the code compliant building much more energy saving than the buildings of the past, even those built last year.

Following are highlighted examples of Resilient and Sustainable Design.