From the design of green buildings to resilience management of building stocks

ABSTRACT

The green and the subsequent sustainable building movements have been framed by changing societal contexts. Their main focus has been on the design of new buildings. However, these movements have neglected the life span of existing buildings and the long-term management of building stocks. The reasons why are considered: the changing interpretations of sustainability, the evolution of different forms of tacit knowledge, lack of a metabolic framework covering the built environment and lack of a consistent multi-scale building information modelling (BIM). The transition toward a ‘risk society’, with an increasing diversity and frequency of threats, challenges the current optimistic definition of sustainability. Resilience addresses fast- and slow-moving threats that can lead to unknown consequences and new risks. Alternative planning approaches (e.g. scenario planning, adaptive change and resilience heuristics) are discussed. The differences between anticipation- and resilience-based strategies are considered. Possible heuristics can be found in social–ecological systems, in resilience engineering and in the historic evolution of the built environment. Resilient solutions generally lead to a higher level of complexity and carry additional environmental costs. In the creation of resilience capacity, new knowledge will be co-produced through transdisciplinary research, scenario planning and design experiments under conditions of uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• adaptation
• building stock
• buildings
• green building
• performance
• resilience
• scenario planning
• sustainability
• vulnerability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Niklaus Kohler http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1861-9739

Notes

1 The US National Building Information Model Standard defines building information modelling (BIM) as a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility. A BIM is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life cycle. Traditional building representations were two-dimensional and document based. BIMs are three dimensional and include a fourth time dimension (life cycle). In BIM, designs are digitally represented as a combination of ‘objects’ which are defined parametrically. If an object is changed, other dependent objects will automatically also change. The different actors of a construction process dispose permanently of a common, consistent building representation. Eastman (2009) establishes a framework for providing specifications for the commissioning of BIM.

2 Heuristics are strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems. These strategies rely on using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem-solving in human beings, machines and abstract issues. When finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution (Wikipedia; see also Pólya, 1945; Harvey, 2007).

3 A special issue of Building Research & Information entitled ‘Resilience in the Built Environment’ was published in 2014, vol. 42(2).