Resilient Design for Human Capital/Human Development-based Buildings

From case studies of architect- and non-architect-designed buildings confronted by natural and manmade disasters of the recent past, this paper extracts exemplary cases of mitigation, adaption, and transformation design responses to disaster instances in first and third world sites at building and town scales.

Cases prepared with graduate students in courses on resilience and research methods studied these tenets of resilience that readily mapped onto architecture (i.e., simple cores/complex edges, modularity). Further, the case method pedagogy challenged students to make architectural decisions before, during, and after disasters. Selected disaster mitigation strategies are abbreviated for (a) post-earthquake school design in Port au Prince, Haiti, (b) future disaster adaptation designs in New Orleans 9th Ward housing post-Hurricane Katrina, and (c) post-tornado transformative building designs that changed the identity of small town Greensburg, Kansas.

Efforts to better ascertain critical roles for architects during relatively predictable disaster events (i.e., hurricanes, flood, wildfire, storm surge, sea level rise) are explored and illuminated.

keywords: Resilience theory, human development, case method pedagogy for decision-making