Disaster-resilient school design in the Philippines

Maricris Irene V. Tamolang in the Philippine Daily Inquirer: While some schools in the Philippines serve as evacuation centers in times of calamities, none are especially designed to adapt to and withstand natural disasters. Like other structures vulnerable to tropical storms, schools get damaged or worse, destroyed, depriving evacuees the safety they most need.

To address this problem, three incoming senior architecture students at the University of the Philippines Diliman came up with a climate-adaptive and disaster-resilient school design strong enough to survive supertyphoons like “Yolanda.”

With inputs from the group’s adviser, Nicolo del Castillo, “Taklob,” which means cover (derived from the word “Tacloban”), topped the school category of “Build Forward,” a competition sponsored by a property developer. The team members modeled Taklob after the structural design of a bridge introduced in their Architectural Structures IV class last semester, said Rafael Khemlani, who suggested the idea.

This model mainly accounted for the arches and cable wires that replaced the conventional columns in most construction projects, he said. Each classroom has an area of 76.5 sq m. It has a restroom and an evacuation supply storage—both located at the rear side—and doors at both ends of the front side. The floor is elevated 1 meter from the ground to prevent damage from storm surges.

...“We won’t call it a green design because the main element used is mostly steel,” Mervin Afan said. “But it is sustainable because of its tropical feature, allowing air to pass through easily. It is climate-adaptive because of its flexibility. During hot days, you can leave the storm shutters open and when the rainy season sets in, you can keep them closed.”...

A Philippine resident sits outside of his home in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan. US military photo

How our designs must adapt to a hotter world

Fastcodesign: …Envisioning what the climate will be like 50, 75, or 150 years out is the first step in adaptation planning. We then need to ask: Which activities will be affected and how? What policies will help us cope with predicted change in climate? What opportunities will emerge? How will the design of our cities interface with our new climate? We need to alleviate predicted negative impacts through systems-thinking and build resilience into the system.

Adaptation is more than a good idea. It is a must -- especially when considering that many populations that are most affected by climate change tend to have fewer resources with which to cope with changes -- necessitating the design of adaptable communities as soon as possible. In other words, moving to higher ground is not as easy as it sounds.

…The better we plan now, the easier it will be for us to sustain and prosper in the future. This new way of thinking spans the design, policy, and even global market trends for businesses. While it may not be a national priority at the moment, many local governments are already feeling the impact of these changes and preparing themselves to adapt to continued change in the future through integration with the development of long-range plans. For example, the Coast Guard has moved lighthouses and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority elevated a water treatment facility -- both projects stemming from predicted sea level rise and impact on infrastructure.

Adaptation should not be considered a plan in lieu of reducing emissions, but as a parallel effort. The good news is that many strategies exist to help communities and our designs adapt and reduce emissions, by focusing on “using less” and working within real world constraints on natural resources and energy security. For example, if our plumbing fixtures use less water, then we are not as greatly affected by drought and if we move toward distributed renewable energy, then we will be less threatened by energy distribution interruptions…

Shot of Andy Goldsworthy's Storm King Wall by Brian Thomas, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Designing defences against climate change

Kara Santos in IPS: As the impact of climate change worsens around the globe, a disaster-resilient village is poised to be a solution for urban poor battling the constant floods and typhoons that hit the Philippines.

The concept village, submitted by Johanna Ferrer Guldager of Denmark, is designed around elevated housing clusters. Each house employs green building technologies, such as the use of sustainable materials like bamboo for the floors, walls and roof. Roofs are used as a rainwater collection system leading to a water conservation tank, while small gardens between houses ensure food production even in times of disaster.

The concept won the global architectural design competition dubbed Design Against the Elements (DAtE), which aims to build the first green, liveable, affordable and disaster-resilient village in the country.

A panel of international and local jurors picked the winning architectural design from among 119 entries submitted by professionals and students from 30 countries. "We were very impressed with the different ideas from all over the world," architect Eleena Jamil of Malaysia, who served as one of the jurors, told IPS.

Jamil, who designed a school made of bamboo that won the Millennium School Design Competition for disaster-resilient schools organised in 2008, said that the winner was chosen because of its sustainability and practicality. "The ideas in the winning design are very easy to implement but it considers a holistic approach. It considers the way people interact within the community and how they could grow their own food," she said….

Not an actual photo of the winning design -- just a treehouse

Standing up to the surge

Beth Daley in the Boston Globe: In the sunshine, Johnson & Wales University’s new Cuisinart Center for Culinary Excellence looks sleek and sharp; it’s a light-filled space on the Narragansett Bay campus. In a hurricane, a piece of the building may wash away — by design. Glass panels and a brick facade placed on the ground floor by the Cambridge architects Tsoi/Kobus & Associates would give way if floodwaters slam into the building.

The breakaway walls would allow water to flow freely past columns holding up the rest of the 82,000-square-foot building, ensuring it isn’t damaged by the ocean’s force. Nearby buildings would also be protected, because destructive floodwaters would not be redirected by any fixed walls.

Such designs have long been common for homes at the beach, where storm surges are so frequent that ground floors typically consist of little more than storage space or a garage. Now, architects are beginning to adopt them for far larger commercial and industrial buildings along the coast as climate change causes sea levels to rise.

“We were able to take advantage of creative construction,’’ said Chris Placco, vice president of facilities for Johnson & Wales. “And we basically built the building up on stilts.’’

...Boston is investing heavily in ways to adapt to and prepare for rising seas, including requiring large projects to consider climate change in their construction planning, said James Hunt, the city’s chief of environmental and energy services….

A storm surge during Hurricane Eloise, via NOAA

Architectural impact of climate change mimicked in lab tests

The University of Bristol (UK): The architectural and structural havoc wreaked by torrential rain, flooding and fluctuating temperatures could be prevented thanks to analysis based on laboratory simulations. Through a series of tests using the combined talent of architects, scientists and engineers, experts hope to produce a clear picture of the anticipated effects of climate change on historic buildings throughout the UK, in some cases, over the next 100 years.

The initiative is part of a multi-million project aimed at preserving archaeological sites identified by the National Trust in Deer Hurst, Tewkesbury, York and Winchester, through a collaboration between the universities of Bath, Bristol and Southampton.

One of the key tests will be to assess the flooding risks using sophisticated flood and climate change modelling tools developed by the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences. The models predict the depth, extent and velocity of flooding using computer simulations, which map a range of potential flood patterns onto detailed terrain data taken at high resolution by scanning lasers, fixed to aircraft or road vehicles to enable an exact level of precision.

“Risk assessments are valuable in ensuring that resources are concentrated towards sites that are most likely to need flood protection,” said Professor Paul Bates. “What is unique about this project is the inter-disciplinary approach; working with architects and engineers will enable us to better calculate future potential damage and impact.

“We don’t know exactly how much climate is going to change in the future but we do have a range of things that might happen. Our aim is to develop predictions that will take account of the full range of possible scenarios. It’s a case of quantifying those uncertainties and identifying what action would need to be taken.”…

Windsor Castle and the River Thames from the Brocas Meadows in Eton, shot by Chris Wood, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has a new exhibit of keen interest to everyone in the adaptation business (March 24 through October 11): MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City's harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.

An architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 (November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010) brings together five interdisciplinary teams, including Architecture Research Office (ARO), to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. These creative solutions are intended to dramatically change our relationship to one of the city’s great open spaces.

This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials.

Sunset over New York City. In "Flug und Wolken" (Flight and Clouds), Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, München (Munich), 1932. Image from United States Coast and Geodetic Survey