By Christian Hamaker
Two years after highlighting resilience during its Building Innovation conference, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) revisited that theme for Building Innovation 2025, held May 20–21 in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
A robust lineup of speakers discussed the effects of resilience on the building sector—and beyond.
In his opening remarks, NIBS President and CEO George Guszcza said that the promise of American innovation “is showing cracks,” and that “communities, especially the most vulnerable, bear the costs” of that weakness.
Part of the organization’s response to those concerns can be found in the 2025 Moving Forward Report, from the NIBS Consultative Council, released May 12. The report, “Retrofitting for Resilience,” highlights the challenges that affect buildings and how retrofitting can reduce risk.
“Retrofitting our buildings isn’t just smart. It’s economical,” Guszcza said, adding that resilience must be a shared responsibility between the public and private sectors.
Former Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana delivered the keynote address, drawing upon his personal experience with disaster recovery. He recalled the approximately 1,700 lives lost from Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago and said that the $150 billion spent during recovery could have saved 80-90% of the lives lost during that storm.
“I’ve made it my mission to prevent anyone from having to go through this again,” Graves said, noting that during the last five years our disaster-recovery costs have doubled from 40 years earlier, rising from about $60 billion to about $120 billion. He also said a growing number of US residents is moving to more vulnerable areas.
“It is a disaster what’s going on,” Graves said, criticizing the pace and scope of recovery efforts, which are often bogged down in red tape or sustained timelines that lead to increased costs. “Our own federal government revictimizes victims with the process of recovery,” Graves said. “This is the United States of America, and we can do better.”
Exhibits opened following the keynote. (IIBEC, one of the event sponsors, showcased the benefits of membership for Building Innovation attendees.) Morning education sessions focused on waterfront design, digital and physical technologies, the future of codes and standards, an integrated framework for resilient infrastructure planning, and retrofitting.
At “Anchoring Resilience with Sustainable Waterfront Design,” Tom Klein, waterfront planning and design advisor for the Waterfront Alliance, discussed the benefits of Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (WEDG). “In Miami they’re using WEDG as policy carrot in a couple of neighborhoods downtown: If you build to the WEDG guidelines you can get your projects expedited,” Klein said.
Klein added that WEDG, while specific to waterfront properties, works well with other design tools. “We’ve created something that’s applicable to waterfronts, but ultimately it strengthens different verification tools, building on the strengths of already existing verifications.”
Jay Valgora, principal and founder of Studio V, recalled work he did on Coney Island after it experienced extensive flooding from Hurricane Sandy, and Janis Fedorowick, principal at Wavefront Planning, shared her experience working on energy-saving projects in the South Pacific.
“Retrofit for Resilience: Older Buildings, Current Risks—When Life Safety Is Enough!” focused on resiliency against earthquakes. Bob Pekelnicky, senior principal at Degenkolb Engineers, said only four cities, all in Southern California, require that older concrete buildings be retrofit. “Why? It costs too much,” Pekelnicky said, challenging the industry to make seismic standards in building codes more flexible.
John Harris, a research structural engineer at NIST, pointed out that policies to achieve resiliency aren’t the same thing as the building code itself, adding that NIST’s Standards of Seismic Safety for Existing Federally Owned and Leased Buildings, RP 10-22, “sits between code and policy.”
Pekelnicky said that only one retrofitting program in the US has succeeded, owing to its prioritization of facilities most in need. “For 30 years there’s been a program in place to retrofit every hospital in California,” Pekelnicky said. The program used a tiered system—“the worst of the worst were tackled first”—leading to “dramatically increased resilience of the California hospital system.”
During “Connecting Design and Resilience,” panelists Jon Penndorf and David Cordell, both of Perkins&Will, and Luz Toro, director of resilience for the American Institute of Architects, presented their experience with resilient design in Washington, DC, and in the country of Columbia. Cordell discussed a case study of his work on the Greenpeace Headquarters in Washington and his use of PRECEDE (the Public Repository to Engage Community and Enhance Design Equity), an open-source website, accessible to all, that pulls from several public health databases to provide a healthier built environment. “They wanted to tell a story about climate change while telling a story about health and about embodied carbon,” Cordell said.
Day Two of Building Innovation 2025 brought more education sessions and time to peruse services and products from conference exhibitors.
“Advancing Resilient Communities with AI and Innovative Structural Technologies” featured Emre Toprak, assistant vice president at WSP; Nathan Canney, director structural engineering at Taylor Devices Inc.; and Justin Marshall, president of DuraFuse Frames.
Toprak drew upon a McKinsey study showing how the construction-sector productivity has declined since the 1950s and research showing that research and development expenditures as percent of revenue for structural engineering at top firms placed fifth in a list of five areas of R&D spending. He showed how predictive AI can help close the gap in industry R&D and productivity.
As part of the same presentation, Canney showed how fluid viscous dampers—especially in combination with Marshall’s DuraFuse products—can lead to reduced damage from earthquakes and to a much quicker reoccupancy timeline for damaged hospitals.
During the session block that followed, Dale Crawford, executive director at the Steel Tube Institute, and Business Development Consultant Casey Robb presented “Building Beyond Code: Lifeline Infrastructure and the Case for Coordinated Resiliency,” in which they showed how resilience extends beyond the building enclosure to lifeline infrastructure that helps people survive and recover after natural disasters.
Crawford opened with a personal story showing why resiliency is important to him. On April 24, 2011, Days after moving his young family to Alabama, the US experienced one of the deadliest days in US history: the Super Outbreak of tornadoes across several Southern states. Houses and churches were destroyed, and a nearby industrial waterfront and nuclear power plant were affected, leading to faulty communications about potential threats to tornado survivors.
Crawford said his anecdote “shows how much we rely on our infrastructure—the ability to pump water, have power, get back on track.” But our building codes don’t extend to the lifeline infrastructure that provides and preserves the things Crawford noted.
Robb discussed what it might take to draw up and approve a potential lifeline infrastructure code. “One fault in lifeline can absolutely cascade into another. Building to [the building] code is the least acceptable outcome. It’s enough to get by, but does it really address lifeline infrastructure?”
Robb recalled that after Hurricane Andrew, “we raised the bar” in developing more resilient building designs. “Why aren’t we being more proactive in Tornado Alley or Earthquake Central?” he asked.
A closing plenary panel, “Making the Business Case of Revenue Resilience for Disaster Mitigation,” featured Rallis Kourkoulis, managing partner at Grid; Maria C. Lehman, US infrastructure market leader at GHD; Terence Smith, CEO of Smith’s Research and Gradings; and Sissy Nikolaou, of NIST’s engineering laboratory,
Nilolaou shared a video simulation based on actual data of a viaduct collapsing during an earthquake, damaging a highway and leading to a fire—an illustration of how different types of critical infrastructure can be affected by a natural disaster.
Smith gave voice to the investor’s perspective on disaster relief measures. “What’s in it for me?” he asked. “That’s the key when you’re talking to Wall Street.”
Lehman pointed out that while building science officials tend to focus on building codes, “I think it’s more important that we focus on the standards,” adding out that many communities are bound by codes that “may be following standards that are 20 years old.”
Building Innovation 2026 will be held May 18–20 in Tysons Corner, VA.
