As a young architect in 1993, I was working on the design for a new performing arts center near Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami. Our team, led by renowned architect César Pelli, faced a complex commission riddled with challenges. We wanted to create capacious public lobbies that would architecturally set the stage for the performances held in the theater, but immediately, we had a serious problem: Federal flood regulations demanded the lobby floor be 10 feet above street level. At the time, this felt like an enormous burden on the design. How could we make the buildings feel open, gracious, and public when all the action was raised a full floor above the street? Climate change and rising sea levels weren’t on our radar 20 years ago, nor were the imminent dangers of storm destruction so vivid to urban residents today. Current analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy–like storms may become annual events by 2100, and 80 percent of potential exposure can be found in the 30 largest cities in the world–with Miami near the top of the list. Of late, there’s been growing public attention on how to make our cities “resilient,” able to bounce back quickly from the regular assault of the unstable environment.
Our FEMA-inspired
requirements in Miami were simple–raise the building above the incoming water
in what we perceived to be a very unlikely event. It was the aqueous equivalent
of preparing a building for an earthquake. But now climate change-driven
disasters have become the earthquakes of the modern age–yet fiercer, only
slightly less predictable, and more resistant to the application of brute
intellect, concrete, and steel. Can we think and build our way to urban
resilience with more than simple rules like floor-level height? We have the
talent and the technology, but those factors alone are insufficient for the
task at hand. This might be a surprising conclusion from an architect and
technologist who, as a vice president at Autodesk, studies the latest
structures and the digital tools used to build them. With enough money and
will, can’t we deploy today’s sophisticated technology to block the rising
water, seal the subways, stabilize the roadways, and keep the lights on? My
architecture colleagues in lower Manhattan, whose homes and offices were
damaged by Sandy, will have plenty of ideas about how to fortify our cities.
Those ideas and others like them will consume $52 trillion dollars in the next
10 years (which is almost double the typical output of worldwide construction)
and generate a lot of design and construction business. Still, we’ll need to
make some big changes in the norms of the building process before any of those
design ideas have a chance of becoming real.
EVERYONE INVOLVED IN BUILDING SHOULD
SHARE RESPONSIBILITY AND RISK
First,
creating resilience strategies that harden our infrastructure means finding new
ways of understanding, managing, and embracing risk–something the building
industry is not good at. As anyone in the field knows, many projects–as many as
a third–fail to meet basic objectives like schedules or deadlines. Construction
is also one of the most litigious realms of modern business today; often the
last phase of any building project consists of the various parties attempting
to assign blame for failures, both real and imagined. We have few ways of
assessing, measuring, quantifying, or assigning risk in building projects and
no incentives for designers, builders, or even project financiers to assume it.
We just don’t have that muscle, but we need to develop it quickly, with new
risk-assessment tools that can quantify the probabilities, size, and effects of
future storms. Clients today–and especially government–negotiate vigorously to
shift as much of the risk as possible to providers in the misbegotten quest to
step away from any responsibility for problems or failures irrespective of
their origin. Yet the inherently unpredictable nature of increasing city
resiliency won’t come without risks, and those risks should be shared by all
the players in the process. Courts in Italy recently found seismic engineers
criminally negligent for failure to properly predict a deadly earthquake,
guaranteeing that no such engineers will ever want to work in Italy again. Does
this serve the public interest?
IMPROVISE SOLUTIONS TO DISASTER
Making
our cities resilient also demands that designers and builders anticipate the
magnitude of the adverse effects of storms with the flexibility to improvise
new solutions as the completely expected unexpected occurs. By contrast, design
and building methods today are ploddingly linear, sequential, and mostly
impervious to opportunities for such improvisation. Designers create without
help from builders, and builders struggle to understand the resulting ideas.
Improvisation isn’t part of the formula, but it should be.
SHIFT THE EMPHASIS FROM COST TO OUTCOME
You
can’t develop muscles that you don’t use, and the current business models of
Western construction–the delivery mechanisms by which any infrastructure
resilience project will be made real–are completely unsuited to the monumental
task of fortifying our cities. We’ve seen how well a project of similar
complexity, Boston’s Big Dig, has fared under existing norms. Most construction
is measured by a single reductive common denominator–the low bid. Thus,
designers and builders are perversely incentivized to work as little as
possible, take on as little risk as possible, and avoid opportunities for
improvisation. Everyone is working toward their own goals first and the
objectives of the project second. This situation results in what aviators call
a “goat rodeo,” where about a hundred things have to go exactly right to escape
unscathed. Clients, government agencies, architects and engineers, and builders
need a new set of rules, codes, and business norms–and we should work together to
create them. We need to shift from lowest first-cost contracting to deals based
on project outcomes. With today’s building technologies, project teams can
simulate the behavior of proposed designs and test digital prototypes for
resilience before they are ever constructed. Why not leverage these
capabilities to structure projects and align everyone–government agencies,
designers, builders, operators–around a set of agreed-upon performance goals,
assign risk and reward accordingly?
0 comments:
Post a Comment