Designing for disaster.

Recent events across the world have induced an understandable sense of paranoia about whether the built environment is capable of resisting what used to be called 'the elements'; that is to say extreme conditions in respect of earth, air, fire and water. Ancient Greek cosmology may seem old hat in a world of fractals and cyberspace, but earthquake, hurricane, conflagration and flood have been all too relevant since the Pacific tsunami heralded the year 2005. Man-induced climate change, a worrying enough possibility in its own right, can scarcely be held accountable for the natural disasters that have afflicted both first and third worlds in recent months. Nor has there been any rush to judgement in respect of the architecture that has signally failed to survive elemental attack; perhaps that phrase beloved of the insurance industry, 'Act of God', has led the public to excuse some of the results of extreme climate. Instead, the search for somebody to blame switches to those responsible for what happens after a natural disaster, and those who might have prevented the disaster from happening in the first place, generally speaking engineers and politicians.

However, there are questions that architects might care to ask themselves as they view scenes of devastation across the globe, scenes which are not the consequences of terrorism. It is an observable fact that architects can be all too quick to design buildings and environments in ways which are bound to create problems--and then show their ingenuity by bypassing them, waiting for a round of applause rather than the proper response, which is 'Why did you do something which created a problem in the first place?' The classic example of this, across the developed world, is the near obsession with building on flood plains. No sooner does this become the subject of warnings, than clever designs for houses (on stilts, for example) make an appearance, though this sort of thinking is rarely applied to road construction in the same areas. That, of course, is someone else's design problem. Perhaps when governments stop underwriting the costs of retrofitting, after the inevitable flooding, we will all learn some sense.

This is not to say that the Dutch have wasted their time reclaiming land across the centuries. We are where we are, but given the likely effects of climate change it is going to be a highly expensive exercise to keep all those flood defences in good order. Not everyone has to behave as though they can defy nature in the same way; why not try working with water rather than against it? Why build on seismic faults? Why imagine that a once-in-200 year risk means you can wait two centuries rather than acting now? To an extent, architects are in the 'what if' game, as much as those engineers and politicians. Perhaps they should be supplying more lateral thought.