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Adobe. Stilts. Concrete walls and ember-catching roofs. To adapt to a warming world, design has to relearn how to be local.
Blame architecture. Unreinforced buildings crumbled in Turkey’s earthquake. Heatwaves across the U.K. and India turned steel and glass high rises into greenhouses literally cooking people to death. One-size fits all architecture — a fallout of the industrial revolution and increased globalization — took advantage of inexpensive mass-produced materials, like concrete, steel, and glass, to standardize structures everywhere without consideration for local climate conditions.
From Mumbai to Tokyo to Vancouver to New York City, concrete tower blocks sprung up everywhere over the last century. Built without courtyards, natural air flow, or landscaping, the apartment blocks were vulnerable to extreme temperatures and created heat islands — increasing temperatures in these blocks by several degrees and requiring air conditioning when inhabitants could afford it.
Air conditioning is both a blessing and a curse for a warming planet. A blessing because it can literally save lives when temperatures spike. And a curse because millions of people cranking them up during heatwaves can push electricity grids past their breaking point, a problem that will only worsen as the world gets hotter. Air conditioning also literally warms outside temperatures by another 1 degree Celsius, creating a vicious cycle of heat.
Recently, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres predicted that rising seas would affect more than a billion people and create mass exodus on a biblical scale. Is there a version of this climate narrative that results in a rebirth of adaptable, resilient, and habitable housing? Will the threat of climate migration and extreme weather herald a return to regional design, a trend that better tailors engineering, materials, and technology to local conditions?
Pioneering efforts to merge architecture and climate resilience into a form of regional design is 2023 Pritzer Prize winner David Chipperfield. He launched Fundacion IRA in Galicia with the city’s government and urban planners in response to the scale of challenges presented by global warming. In his acceptance statement for the award, Chipperfield said, “We know that, as architects, we can have a more prominent and engaged role in creating not only a more beautiful world but a fairer and more sustainable one too. We must rise to this challenge and help inspire the next generation to embrace this responsibility with vision and courage.”
And we already know how to do this.
Tropical Modernism is an architecture style that elevated the indigenous traditions of the tropics. Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka and Vladimir Ossipof in Hawaii both connected indoors and outdoors, used overhanging roofs, local woods, and even lava to create structures in harmony with the tropical climate and way of life.
Like Tropical Modernist architects, Le Corbusier tempered climate extremes in Chandigarh, the planned city he designed in northern India, with architectural and landscape interventions — tree canopies, roof overhangs, shutters, verandas, and reflecting pool. The structures could protect from storms and bring in cooling breezes; invite in the daylight, but not the heat. But he also considered Chandigarh a living biological entity and designed the city to facilitate “breathing” in the region’s extreme climate. To do this, he prioritized thermo dynamic performance: prevailing winds, evaporative cooling and convection currents to maximize cooling and promote air circulation.
Pueblo-style adobe homes have historically responded well to harsh conditions — namely heat — but are also proving resistant to fire, hurricanes, and even earthquakes. Built typically in desert environments from Morocco to Spain to Central America to the U.S. Southwest, adobe homes have morphed into styles that include modern earthships made of clay, dirt, old tires, (and whatever else is laying around) and also the amorphously shaped cob homes. Conrad Rogue, who has taught earthen design for 20 years at House Alive in Oregon, insists adobe and cob homes are beautiful, not just for hippies and a good solution for the climate crisis, “Earthen homes, made of local clay soil and straw, have survived thousands of years and can be built in all climates in all parts of the world.”
There is no refuting the climatic benefits of clay and Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré’s approach to regional adobe design is refreshingly modern. He combined recent engineering principles with traditional building techniques to create the stunning Gando Primary School in Burkino Faso, which stays cool without air conditioning even though temperatures are in the 90s year round.
A few other ways architects are responding to extreme weather beyond heat include building homes to withstand fire, flood risks, and even hurricanes.
Northern California-based Faulkner architects build in wildfire-prone zones and are gathering expertise in construction with non-combustible materials and using landscaping to limit the risk of igniting as well as providing "defensible space," by limiting the amount of highly flammable vegetation around it. One Faulkner project, a family house near Lake Tahoe, was only 25 miles away from the Caldor fire in 2021. After, they reinforced the home in a “fire-resistive shell” of concrete walls and a steel roof coated with an ember-catching membrane. They also installed window glazing that can withstand temperatures of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and gives the house a real chance of surviving a wildfire.
And it’s becoming more and more possible to live in a flood zone. Stilts protect houses built on floodplains and from rising tides. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety says, “There’s no real substitute for elevation. It's your best bet." U.K. architect Lisa Shell’s beach house is a great example. She built it out of cork on stilts over an estuary where high tide flows under the house.
More and more, architects are designing with climate in mind:
• Genzler Architects built a photovoltaic canopy that shades an entire office building.
• Copenhagen-based Snohetta partnered on Harvard HouseZero to experiment ways to maximize energy efficiency of an old house. They recently completed Under, an underwater restaurant built to withstand rough seas and destined to become part of the seabed.
• BIG architects, famous for Copenhill, their waste-to-energy ski slope in Copenhagen, completed the first fully sustainable factory that doubles as a public park in Norway for outdoor furniture company Vestre.
• Land on Water is a transportable floating housing community developed by Danish Maritime Architecture Studio MAST
• Cosmic pre-fab houses are built for climate extremes with heat pumps and solar panels.
• Buhaus prefabs are made with fire-resistant aluminum facades.
• London-based Hugh Broughton Architects designs for both Antarctica and Mars. His Halley VI remote mobile research station was in a movie with Cate Blanchett and has moveable hydraulic legs that can be raised over snow drifts and slid to a new location if the ice melts. The Martian house explores new ways of living resourcefully here on Earth or on Mars. But architecture will need to do more than just return to regional design to create habitable structures that will withstand the environmental volatility coming our way.
It’s probably more instructive to look to the work of Shigeru Ban who has been constructing disaster housing in response to earthquakes, wars, and floods since the Kobe earthquake in 1995. He invented a system of recycled paper tubes that allow for quick construction of emergency shelters that can transition to permanent housing. (His latest prototype for Ukraine is a flat-pack, lightweight, easy-to-assemble house.)
In her book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather and Sensation, Harvard Professor and architect Sylvia Benedito explores habitats and communities that have learned to live with extreme weather in a resourceful way.
She believes Le Corbusier’s approach at Chandigarh is even more relevant today, “Chandigarh budgets were low and they could not afford air conditioning and they had to find inventive ways to tackle the climate challenges. Operating just as an architect doesn't help us think about climatic amelioration. Landscapes are vehicles for transforming punitive and inhospitable environments into spaces capable of accommodating and nurturing human life.”
“That’s why it is so frustrating,” she continues, “to see architects cut down trees, put in glass. I believe the next decades will see a revolution in landscape management.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.