Adapting to Climate Change through Architecture

Abstract

An environmental crisis is unfolding around us. Our climate is continuously changing in dramatic rates. This paper explores the impact of climate change on the built environment, with the intent to find solutions for how to understand environmental changes, raise awareness, and eventually overcome the challenges that we face. Environmental challenges can be addressed through building design. One can consider three aspects that can address the way we design and construct our buildings. The first one is how can our architecture be innovative in terms of optimizing our current technologies to achieve unprecedented building performance, and the second one is how can we optimize our energy resources to fit the needs of our environment first, and how can we design our architecture to be satisfied with those optimized resources? The third one focus how can we create architecture that would positively and intelligently adapt and change along with our rapidly changing climate? These questions will be answered throughout presenting a number of case studies that will be analyzed within environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural scopes.