Personal Hurricane Experience in Barbados

• Childhood memories: annual hurricane season preparations
  • Duct-taping glass doors in X patterns
  • Boarding up windows (leaving 1-2 open to "let wind come through")
  • Placing buckets in living room to catch rain from sagging roof
• Fear of tropical waves, thunderstorms, hurricanes
• Basic survival conditions: no light, water, electricity - only battery radio for "all clear"
• Childhood question: why not build safer structures if storms happen annually?

Current Climate Crisis Reality

• Adult fears matching childhood experiences due to climate change
• Recent freak storms in Barbados unlike anything seen before
• Specific storm event: 500 lightning strikes per minute, no advance warning
• Category 1 hurricane weeks later destroyed 2,000+ homes
• Barbados context: <300,000 people, 166 square miles - small events = big losses
• Need for architecture that "genuinely performs" vs. "beautifully passive"

Professional Approach to Climate-Resilient Design

• Speaker: architectural designer creating nature-aware protective structures
• Philosophy: harness and embrace nature rather than fight it
• Drawing on traditional micro lessons from community experience
• Focus on inherent resilience stories from local context

Historical Context: Bajan Chattel Houses

• Post-slavery era (after abolition of African/Indigenous enslavement)
• Newly freed people couldn't own land - still "chattel" of former enslavers
• Solution: portable timber homes with no nails, on coral stone foundations
• Requirements: robust enough for tropical weather, temporary for quick relocation
• Survival strategy when disputes arose with former enslavers

Traditional Design Principles

• Materials: readily available timber, no proprietary systems
• Strategy: work with wind instead of against it
• Key feature: jalousie windows (from French "jalousie" = jealousy)
  • Originally designed to prevent peering eyes
  • Angled horizontal slats (louvers) filter wind while keeping rain out
• Wind management: intentionally aligned apertures allow hurricane passage through interior
• Result: prevents destructive pressure buildup on facade
• Outcome: houses "might bend but wouldn't totally break"

Modern Applications of Traditional Principles

• Regional departure from global convention of closing buildings off from nature
• Focus on holistic performance with environment vs. external aesthetics
• Emphasis on micro solutions and details that "make or break" buildings

Post-Hurricane Maria (2017) Reconstruction

• Common question: "How do we build back better?"
• Methodology: take what works, discard what doesn't, apply to modern designs
• Modern timber fin facade interpretation:
  • Breaks up wind against building exterior
  • Allows light penetration to interior
  • Protects glass from wind and wind-driven missiles
  • Eliminates need for duct tape
• Sacrificial central core design:
  • Allows wind penetration through building interior
  • Preserves adjacent watertight bunker zones for human retreat
  • Eliminates need for buckets

Broader Climate Resilience Applications

• Colleagues in island nations integrating similar traditional-to-modern strategies
• Applications beyond hurricanes: floods, earthquakes, landslides
• Stilted designs: elevation above torrential downpour and inundation
• Cross-brace lattice elements: flexibility for earth movement/shaking

Digital Design and Testing Methods

• Intelligent digital twin modeling in virtual reality
• 3D computerized carbon copy of each micro solution
• Stress-testing capabilities with real-world climate scenarios
• Virtual environment benefits: no human life loss, no infrastructure damage
• Iterative design process: test, fail, fix, tweak, improve, optimize
• Example: Category 5 hurricane wind simulation testing
• Starting from Indigenous references = accessible, culturally appropriate architecture

Psychological Impact of Hurricane Experience

• Mental uncertainty of experiencing/surviving hurricanes
• Total vulnerability and exposure to elements
• Sounds: wind ripping buildings apart, neighbors' screams carried by wind
• "What if?" scenarios: survival uncertainty for self, neighbors, community
• Vision: designing away uncertainty, sheltering with confidence
• Goal: best chance at surviving and weathering storms

Global Context and Urgency

• Contrast: humans putting people in space for leisure vs. constant climate fear
• Exploring survival in distant planetary climates vs. Earth-based climate threats
• Small island nations living in present what others will face in future
• Immediate need to know what works/doesn't work in specific contexts
• "True, immediate, cyclical matter of life and death"

Call to Action for Future Design

• Approach for designing future cities and communities
• Stop leaving vulnerable populations to "guess and hope for the best"
• Base designs on tried, tested, traditional knowledge and lived experience
• Design for "absolute worst" scenarios