New RELi standard addresses disaster resilience

Design firm Perkins+Will has unveiled the RELi standard that uses a points system similar to the LEED model to guide design for disaster resilience. The goal is to encourage city planners, project developers, and businesses to build and operate facilities that can better withstand shocks such as super storms, sea-level rise, drought, heat waves or social unrest.

With 194 requisites and credits, the resilience standard likely will operate on a 1,000-point scale and offer three or four levels of certification. The standard fills a void for insurance underwriters who currently lack a protocol to value the green and resilient attributes of a project, according to Perkins+Will executives.

Those who develop properties according to this standard could be rewarded with lower insurance rates. RELi can also be applied to public sector projects including infrastructure. Perkins+Will is launching several pilots to evaluate the new standard.

The new standard will be discussed at the VERGE City Summit 2015, on Oct. 26 in San Jose, Calif.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.