William Gething, coauthor of Design for Climate Change, warns that traditional construction materials will “behave differently” in a world wracked by global warming:
Brick, for example, is likely to become more saturated, particularly with increasing insulation standards, so it is likely to be less effective at keeping moisture out. Materials move more in higher temperatures, so joint design will need to take this into account. More intense rainfall events mean that gutters need to be sized differently.
Amid these challenges, Steve LeVine heralds the rise of the “extreme-weather architect”:
The emerging class of architecture suggests the onset of a global design-and-construction industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the coming years. Places such as the Netherlands have had to build around environmental- and weather-related challenges for years. But to the degree that extreme-weather architecture and construction moves to the mainstream, it would become one of the biggest infrastructure businesses on the planet, straddling US, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The cost of one recent set of recommendations alone, by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to the ravages of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, is estimated at $20 billion. Studies of the spending to come around the world range well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Recent Dish on Bloomberg and reforms to combat flooding here. As sea levels rise, architects continue to investigate the possibilities of buoyant buildings. One design firm recently finished work on a floating school in Lagos, with a floating neighborhood in the works.
The Dish 