ABSTRACT
Over the past ten years, research tackling the topic of resilience of the built environment increased manifold. Such interest may reflect anticipated changes in our climate and needs to rethink our approach to energy used for heating, cooling and ventilation. The popularity of resilience in scientific literature comes along with a lack of clear definitions and an increasing diversity in approaches. Some of these approaches require opposing consequences for the building design: robustness or flexibility. This chapter reviews definitions of resilience and organizes their diverse meanings into a framework for human-building resilience. Distinctive aspects of resilience like “toughness”, “ability to cope” or “capacity to recover” are linked to definitions of thermal comfort which go beyond comfort as thermal relief provided by thermoneutral conditions. Emphasis is put on thermal encouragement, related to adaptation, and thermal enjoyment, pointing to thermal alliesthesia. Based on these theoretical thoughts, consequences for building design and operation and related research efforts are elaborated. This chapter finishes with a strong vote to shift our focus towards those design and operation concepts, which optimize encouragement and enjoyment and consequently focus on ways to increase human resilience and to lower the dependence on building resilience or intensive energy use.
