A lot of people are talking about resilient designing these days. Alex Wilson of the Resilient Design Institute defines it:
He has completed building his own home according to resilient design principles:
Writing in Mother Earth News, Alex goes into much greater detail about his attempt to build a “more resilient homestead.” He and Jerelyn bought a farm a few miles out of town, and Alex describes how he renovated a 200 year old farm house as a model of resilient design.
The key point, (and the reason we are so fond of Passive House design in TreeHugger) is design for Passive Survivability- what happens when the power goes out.
Passive survivability is defined by the Resilient Design Institute as “ensuring that livable conditions will be maintained in a building in the event of an extended power outage or interruption of heating fuel.” It’s achieved via superb energy design; Here, Alex has super-insulated the building, used passive solar design to get solar gain through south-facing windows (with careful overhang design to protect from overheating), thermal mass to store soars heat, and design for natural ventilation.
© Alex Wilson/ Horrors, he has a heat pump!
But he also has a mini-split heat pump to keep the house warm and when needed occasionally, provide a bit of air conditioning. And for emergencies, there’s a little wood-burning stove.
Interestingly, Alex does not have a battery system, but has a rooftop full of grid-connected solar panels. He does have an inverter that he can plug into during the daytime and hopes to use his electric car for backup power. He has also designed a resilient water system with a hand pump on his well and a spring that runs most of the time.
Then there is food; this is a big worry among the resilience crowd.
Finally, Alex talks about community resilience, and how his house can act as a hub for the 30 homes in his neighbourhood who are less resilient. Alex concludes:
© Alex Wilson
There are so many admirable things going on here, from the way Alex built his house out of healthy materials, using cork for insulation above grade and foamed glass below.
But questions arise when you start to ask, does this scale? How many people actually can practice what Alex is preaching? Who among us has the skills to do this? What is really going to happen when Alex opens the doors of his house as a community hub in a time of crisis?
Exactly five years ago, Alex wrote a series on BuildingGreen, Making the case for resilient design where he first laid out the basic principles and noted:
This still holds true; At the time I summarized the lessons he was teaching in How to build a resilient design: Make it smaller, higher, stronger and warmer.
But as Alex notes in his resilient design strategies, we have to achieve resilience at the community scale, and on the regional and ecosystem scale. None of us can do this alone.
