Redefining resilience in buildings – From past to today and future conditions
Resilience is about designing systems and teaching them how to react to shock events, i.e., what anticipatory time is and the time for recovery and adaptation. How the systems respond and possibly adapt depends on their resilience, which can vary from adaptive resilience to resilience based on recovery time (i.e. returning to the state or taking longer to recover) to ultimate failure, meaning complete lack of resilience.
Etymology of resilience: Recovery and adaptation
The dictionary defines resilience as 'the ability to recover from difficulties or disturbances'. It originates from the Latin term 'resilio', meaning 'to return to a state' or 'to spring back'.
In the 19th century, resilience was defined as the capacity of specific materials to withstand specific disturbances, and it was used in engineering to assess the resilience of buildings and materials. In the 20th century, researchers studied many forms of resiliency and found that a framework could apply to many scenarios and subjects, such as resilience in connection to psychology, risk exposure and stability in ecological systems, among many others.
Resilience in construction and engineering
The four Rs of resilience are:
- Robustness: how to withstand events without suffering loss of function
- Resourcefulness: how to identify resources and problems
- Redundancy: how to cope with various paths to enable continued function
- Rapidity: how tow to set priorities to restore in time
In engineering and construction, resilience is all about the ability to absorb or avoid damage without suffering complete failure. It is an objective of design, maintenance and restoration for buildings, infrastructure and communities.
The USGBC and LEED green building certification define resilience as "the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events".
What should you know about resilience?
When we talk about resilience in connection to buildings today, we talk about the climate-related events (climate change, extreme weather disasters, etc.). All buildings, regardless of location, are subjected to the conditions and forces imposed on them from the natural environment. The concept of resilience is gaining attention in terms of durability to withstand climate-related events, and at the same time, redundancy is also being designed to protect occupants when critical building systems fail.
Design professionals and building codes address and strengthen buildings' resilience to a basic level through engineering and architectural approaches, using, for example, material durability and withstanding ability, including absorption effects.
Resilience through adaptability and flexibility
A resilient building changes over time and serves multiple functions. Designers and owners should recognise that a building’s life cycle extends beyond its initial use and plan for potential adaptations.
Health-related events, such as the last pandemic, hugely highlighted the flexibility of buildings in the spatial need for social distancing and planning in buildings and the need to look at work efficiency through remote patterns, including the new digital environments in people's lives.
Difference between sustainability and resilience
Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Resilience ensures that even during unforeseen events, it does not fail catastrophically and continues operations. Resilience planning allows communities, infrastructures and systems to bounce back after events.
Resilience through repair and reuse (including many other Rs) is a relatively new and rapidly developing building phenomenon. Resilient design and architecture find ways to extend the use of buildings. A very high level would be the resilience plan for the unexpected, which could, for example, involve fixing a building after an unforeseen event. This also embodies the idea of a circular economy, allowing buildings, for example, to be disassembled and reused in future projects after unforeseen events.
Designing for resilience means accounting for both current and future conditions
Resilience is about being prepared and mitigating negative impacts. However, we can be even more holistically prepared to support, adapt and maintain buildings. It is a way of considering a building's larger impact in unexpected events. As unforeseen events become more frequent, unpredictable, and intense, buildings still must adapt to protect lives, systems and environments. Resilience in buildings is no longer an option; it is a necessity that demands action from all, such as investors, architects, engineers and others involved.
Would you like to know more about resilience?
Here is a whitepaper on how to create indoor climate resilience in buildings. This paper is based on well-founded research and academic findings from the most recent pandemic. The conclusions presented in research are made from studying the time when everyone had to learn how to live and cope in a pandemic state, when trial and error was the way forward and when effective measures were intensely debated. Across the available research, it becomes clear that mechanical ventilation is a key component in tackling airborne transmission and strengthening resilience for future pandemics.
