July DMC Sustainability Speaker Series

20180718
12:00:00 - 13:00:00
Rochester Public Library
Meeting Room B (Second Floor)
101 2nd St SE
Rochester, MN 55904

Get Directions

Description

Please join us on Wednesday, July 18 from noon-1 p.m. at the Rochester Public Library (Meeting Room B, 2nd Floor) for a presentation about Regenerative Design as a Path to Resilience by Richard Graves, the Director of the Center for Sustainable Building Research and an associate professor in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. He served as the Executive Director of the International Living Future Institute from 2012-2014, leading the operations and strategic efforts around all of the Institute’s signature program. His research focuses on design for regenerative and resilient development.

A new direction of research is needed to create communities and buildings that are not only sustainable but also resilient in responding to dynamic situations. There is a tension between resilience, efficiency, and sustainability. As the first truly sustainable buildings are built, it is questioned how they will perform over time in dynamic conditions. Are highly efficient buildings optimized so much that they cannot adapt to changing climate conditions, operating parameters and the life of occupants? All of these types of changes and others will occur in the future and design needs to be not only sustainable but also resilient to perform. The future direction for sustainability research is to incorporate a resilience lens. The project takes high-performance green buildings and modified them to achieve a “regenerative system state” as defined by John Tilman Lyle in his book Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development. The modified projects were then tested against a series of “shocks” to see if the buildings could be not only resilient but sustainable.