The Best in Design, From a Reimagined Frank Lloyd Wright Desk to Marset Lighting

The Big Idea: Resilient in the Extreme

Prioritizing sustainability in an effort to fend off climate change has become mainstream across the design industry. But what can architects do when the planet seems to turn against us anyway? The acceleration of global warming and its adverse effects—wildfires, droughts, flooding, and other natural disasters—is bringing to the forefront an approach to architecture that, while not new, is rapidly gaining a following around the world. Resilient design aims to mitigate the impact of external threats via inventive solutions.

Think of resilient design as a cousin to sustainability: The two are linked, but not the same. “Sustainability is about how you establish something regenerative by using resources in an appropriate, ideally net-zero, way,” says Seattle architect Robert Hutchinson. “Resiliency is the ability to take on or counteract an event,” whether a short-term disaster or long-term stressors.

In essence, resilient design examines the environmental situation in a particular region and innovates ways to lessen harmful effects. One of Hutchinson’s projects, located in central Mexico and designed with architect and homeowner Javier Sanchez, is an off-the-grid residence within a nature reserve without connection to municipal water. The area has wet summers but extremely dry winters; anticipating yearly water needs, Hutchinson and Sanchez created a reservoir that fills up during the rainy season and stores enough water to get the family through the winter.

Elsewhere, architects are responding to other disasters encroaching on the built environment. In Beirut, architect Lina Ghotmeh designed the Stone Garden apartment block using a reinforced-concrete structure with a combed earth-and-concrete facade for protection during earthquakes. (Despite some minor damage, the building withstood the 2020 port explosion that devastated the city.) In New Orleans, Mithūn’s Louisiana Children’s Museum, constructed after Hurricane Katrina, sits at the edge of a lagoon, but the architects allowed for potential water incursion by elevating the building above the flood plain atop deeply set piles. Meanwhile, Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, of Amsterdam-based firm NLÉ, has developed a flexible prototype system of connectable floating pods made with pre-fabricated timber that adapt to changing river, lake, and sea levels, making it possible to build affordable structures on water.

Hutchinson and Sanchez often discuss how the concepts used in their residential design might be scaled to help municipalities including Mexico City, which is experiencing one of the severest droughts in its history. “As architects,” he says, “we have to be the ones to try to enact change.”