How to Be a Better Human - How to build resilience through architecture (w/ Alyssa-Amor Gibbons)

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Millions of people around the world are displaced by the enhanced natural disasters brought on by climate change, and sometimes, our economically driven world makes us feel powerless. Alyssa-Amor Gibbons knows about climate devastation and its effect on community first hand – but she thinks we can tap into our resilience through the power of design. In this episode, Alyssa shares how architecture can fundamentally change our perspective and our relationship to the planet – while helping us honor the indigenous communities that have sustained it for millennia. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Architecture is an art form that, to me, often is invisible. But when I do start to pay attention to it, when I start to really see it, I realize how huge an impact architecture has on my day-to-day life. I mean, it's no exaggeration to say that it is literally all around me, since I'm indoors right now. Architecture is more than just our physical spaces, though.

It also determines how well our homes, our offices, and our other structures hold up under pressure or in a natural disaster. And that's a factor that's increasingly urgent in the face of climate change. That is exactly what today's guest, Alyssa Amor-Gibbons, focuses on in her work. Her approach to architecture has not only helped me to think more about architecture itself, it's also changed the way that I think about resilience. Here's a clip from her TED Talk. As a child growing up in Barbados, there were two things I can count on every summer.

School break and the hurricane season. At some point, we would go through this whole routine of duct-taping all the glass doors in these big X patterns, tightly boarding up all the windows, except for one or two, so that, as my mother would curiously put it, we could let the wind come through. And putting buckets in the living room to catch the rain

in a futile attempt to stop our house from flooding when the roof started to billow and sag in the wind. I hated it because I was terrified the entire time. Whether it was a tropical wave, a thunderstorm, a tropical storm, or the tail end of an actual hurricane that barely missed us, it was all the same to me. A possible end. No light, no water, no electricity, just a simple battery-operated radio waiting for the all-clear. And in my young eyes,

Mother Nature on a personal mission to destroy us all. I never understood why. Why, if we knew this was going to happen every year, why couldn't we just do something to make sure that we were safer? We are going to find out the answer to that question. What could we do to make us all safer in just a moment? Don't go anywhere. We're talking with architect Alyssa Amor-Gibbons about climate resilience, architecture, and learning to live in an unpredictable world.

Hi, my name is Alyssa Amor. and learning to live in an unpredictable world. Hi, my name is Alyssa Amor. I'm an architectural designer from Barbados, and I specialize in sustainable, resilient, energy-efficient architectural design. You design environmentally conscious architecture, and you grew up and you live now in Barbados,

a country that has many times experienced some strong natural forces, both in good ways and in destructive ways. So can you talk about how that influenced your work and the desire to go into this field? Yeah. So growing up on an island is you're kind of hard pressed not to be connected deeply to nature. You're surrounded by it. You know, we live on a rock in the middle of the ocean that's about 166 square miles and about 432 times our land size is our ocean space. So when you talk about flora, fauna, marine life, you're so connected to it because you experience it almost every single day. I grew up spending, I want to say like 90% of my time underwater. You know, I grew up swimming, I grew up spending, I want to say like 90% of my time underwater.

You know, I grew up swimming. I grew up diving. I just grew up either underwater or in class at school. So everything I did as a kid was so connected to nature. And as professionals, we start to quote statistics and argue over 1.5 or 2 degrees. But firsthand, I don't need to quote statistics because I see it. I live it every day. The marine life that I saw underwater as a kid, the coral reefs, is not the same that I see now as an adult. The natural events that you experience as a kid, the tropical storms, where you have, you know, so much notice of these

impending events. Now you're woken up in the middle of the night to events that claim thousands of homes. There's no way, you know, as a human being, forget as a designer, as a human being, to not consider these things as I go about my daily life. When you think about a path forward, it seems like one of the things that is really special about your designs is that you are both using traditional and proven techniques, but then combining them with also modern technologies and modern understanding of the forces of nature too.

Yeah, at a very simple level, I'm here for a reason. I'm here because my mom survived, my dad survived, my ancestors survived, and they had nowhere near the amount of resources or the depth of resources that I have now. And if you start to think at that curious level about how architecture has survived to date, then you start to think, okay, what were the elements of that that made it successful? Unfortunately for us in the Caribbean and throughout a lot of the diaspora, throughout a lot of the global self, it was kind of necessity by not even invention, but sheer force. You need to survive. we have vernaculars that were the outcome of the circumstances that we had to live through. And when you layer on top of the injustices that happened, trying to survive

not just those historical events, but then in natural events, just by the fact that you're in this geographical location, there's a whole new meaning to what does it mean to survive, not just mentally, spiritually, but physically. And at its most basic level, that's what architecture is, shelter. But what I want to put out into the world is this concept that that's just the bare minimum. You know, architecture can do a lot more. And by kind of pairing those sort of first principles of what architecture is with emerging technology, with a bit of vision, what more can we do? Can architecture be a tool to not just survive, but to thrive? In your vision for architecture, what can architecture do? I think architecture has the ability to take people out of poverty in one generation.

I think architecture has the opportunity to take people from the bottom of the pyramid of hierarchy of needs to the top, to our self-actualization. I think architecture is really about carving space out of nothing for me. It's that place you go to as a kid where you realize, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life when I walk into a beautiful library. If I walk into a beautiful urban space, by taking us out of just that basic approach of just dwelling and surviving and sheltering, architecture to me presents such an amazing opportunity to now tap into the holistic, the mental,

the spiritual aspects of who we are as human beings. A building can impact everyone, whether you walk past it on a daily basis and you absolutely hate it and there's this visceral reaction, or if it's just the most beautiful space you've ever seen and you go there to just sit down and mind dump. and there's this visceral reaction, or if it's just the most beautiful space you've ever seen, and you go there to just sit down and mind dump. Architecture has such power beyond just concrete and steel to impact people's lives. It's a really inspiring vision for architecture. And something that I also am really inspired by with your work is the way in which you draw

on that vision and also on nature, but also on history. So I wonder if you can walk us through maybe a piece of history from Barbados that you have incorporated into some of your architectural designs. Caribbean history in general is the vernacular of the chattel house, being oppressed and not having access to certain materials, not having access to wealth, not even having access over ownership of yourself. But out of that, people started to get resourceful, had to figure out ways, okay, we don't have what we need to necessarily withstand and shore up ourselves against these events but how do we work with it rather than try to fight against it so the chattahouse was an early example of that kind

of indigenous architecture where they design their homes their spaces in such a way that when push come to shove for lack of a better phrase you opened it up and you you let the wind pass through instead of knocking the entire house over and that kind of resilience is something that I've pulled into a lot of my inspiration and honestly into some of the tectonic expressions of buildings like in facades for example where you understand that there's an element of flexibility that needs to go in. Although I advocate for the use of technology, we're not God or whatever universal entity you believe in. You may not always get it 100% accurate, but what you try to do is build in the kind of fail-safes and build in the things that take a bit of the guesswork out of how the building

would perform. So if that means taking that idea of allowing the wind to pass through certain aspects of the building and then taking that into a facade where you understand, okay, I'm going to allow this facade to allow the wind to come through in certain areas and disperse the wind load against the building. So that even if there's some damages on superficial elements that have helped to kind of break up the wind force against the building. To me, that is more resilient than suffering a devastating loss, having billions of dollars in damage, and then investing to rebuild very quickly after. For me, resilience is not about withstanding breaking. It's about the flex and the bend while you're going through that thing that's trying to

break you. I mean, talk about an extremely relevant definition, not just for a building, but for us as people too, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, for someone who's listening and hasn't seen your TED Talk or hasn't seen photos or drawings of your designs, paint us a picture of what some of this resiliency might actually look like. There's always a tough one for me to do because every design is so specific to its individual context. But I think there are some elements of thought, at least, that carry through.

That might look like a building that has a sacrificial core, where there's a central place that we acknowledge between myself as a designer and the owner, of course, that if anything happens, this is what we're willing to let go of. And we invest substantial engineering and investment in safeguarding other space that might look like something as simple as how do I orient the building on site so that it's aligned efficiently for sun and heat gain and, you know, wind direction for natural ventilation. It looks different across every building. But I think one of the elements that I kind of draw on is an understanding of what are the natural materials within this area. In some cases, we have taken fell trees that were blown over in hurricanes and incorporated that into the facade, incorporated that into furniture elements within the building, like being on site with the client and the artisans and

pointing to mango trees and saying, okay, we're going to cut this slab out of here and we're going to take this and put it on this part of the building. So for me, what that resilient architecture looks like is not just about the end products, you know, the beautiful photograph in a magazine, but it's about the process that we go through, walking the land with the client. but it's about the process that we go through walking the land with the client i've personally slid down many hillsides mapping out mapping out a site on saturated mud after events with the client and having to be like bailed out um and helped back up but it's about the process of really understanding the space that you're designing in, the ecology of the place, the terrain,

the personality of the site, as I like to call it, and kind of bringing all of those elements together in the best way. Something that I think about when I think about architecture, sometimes visible architecture to me is often only at like the highest end, right? It's these like giant, extremely expensive monumental buildings, or it's these high end luxury homes where it's an artist's vision. And yet architecture is also the tiniest of homes is a product of architecture, the tiniest of spaces. So I wonder, first of all, if that also resonates with you, if that's like how you imagine architecture when you imagine it and how your work kind of challenges that, because I think that it does. Yeah, for like 100 percent. And it's such a it's such a paradox because you kind of have to put your ego aside and think from the point of view of sometimes the best design is something that doesn't need to be designed at all. Barbados is a great example.

I grew up at school. Sometimes we would still have our classes outside under a tamper and tree. And if you asked me to design the ideal school right now, I would put a couple of chairs under a tamper and tree and job done. Job done. So in some ways, it is really about understanding that your job as a designer is not to intervene first. Your job is to understand the real lasting and sometimes invisible after effects of slavery and of racism is that the people who live in the land with the most problems, right, the lowest lying land that's most likely to be flooded, the places that are the most polluted, the most vulnerable. That's not coincidental, right? That is a direct result of policies meant to put certain people in certain places so that they would be at the highest risk. And it does seem like architecture is a way to have a form of reparation. If you can't just

change where people live, at least you can give them homes that work and that aren't as vulnerable. just change where people live. At least you can give them homes that work and that aren't as vulnerable. I could honestly talk forever about this and this. I understand it's an uncomfortable conversation, but it goes both ways. It's as uncomfortable for me and as emotional for me as I'm sure anyone else. And my people, my community, people I grew up with, our ancestors, we've played such a critical role in the development of the rest of the world. For such a small place to have been a linchpin in the development of the wider world, my ongoing life purpose, I feel like, is to figure out how we can re-leverage that identity. There's power in that. There's a lot of bad, there's a lot of ugly, there's a lot of heinous things that have happened, but there's also power to be extracted from that. And particularly after I give my talk,

you know, there are a lot of comments, people can be so mean. But it was one that said something along the lines of, you know, people like this, meaning me, and the countries that they're from, they should basically just be shut down. Like, they shouldn't be allowed to inhabit them anymore. Just put them somewhere else, meaning people like me. And I could not wrap my head around it. You know, Barbados is 300,000 people, but that's 300,000 people, not things or objects to be moved. There's a culture, there's a history. Here, this is home. I'm a designer. I have a background in engineering. I love design. I love a good challenge. surely as a species, we're capable of figuring out how to design better for increasingly bad natural events. So as much as there might be this kind of negative doom and gloom, emotional turmoil of climate change, the climate crisis, I'm still hugely optimistic that there's solutions out there. And what I won't do, though, is sit back and think,

okay, somebody has to come and save me. When I read comments like that, I am extremely aware that people don't always do things out of the goodness of their heart. It needs to make financial sense for most people. Our world is driven by this economic circumstance that we're in. So I think being small, understanding the power in our past, and being able to influence the world at a global scale, despite that size, pulling technology in, because that gives us the limitlessness that kind of counteracts the size that we do have, the size constraint we have. All of those things together to me is endless opportunity to come up with our own solutions.

If someone asks me if a safe home is the equivalent justice reparations wise, I would say no. But for me, we cannot wait for anyone to save us because there's no guarantee anyone will. There are countries out there that have kind of led the way in terms of industrialization and, quite frankly, have landed us in the situation that we're in, in terms of consumption. A 300,000-person country does not, in my opinion, carry that same weight of burden. So is it our burden now to be the ones to overcompensate for what that looks like? Those are conversations we could have for decades to come still. What I focus on is understanding the climate that we're in, the science around it, understanding from a contextual level the issues that we're in, the science around it, understanding from a contextual level, the issues that we have nationally, because we know them better than anyone else and designing our way out of it as best we could.

We're going to take a quick break, but we will be back with more from Alyssa Amor in just a moment. We're talking with Alyssa Amor Gibbons about the future of architecture and what that's going to look like in a world where the climate is changing and becoming more unpredictable and extreme. Here's another clip from Alyssa Amor's TED Talk. to depart from this more global convention of designing our buildings to close themselves off from nature, so that architecture, for us, becomes less about the external expression, aesthetic and shape of the building, but more about its holistic performance in concert with the environment. And because we have started from these indigenous references,

we end up with well-performing, modern, yes, but accessible architecture that is not alien to its cultural or climatic context. Architecture that is not alien to the people who must build and live in it. Why are Indigenous references so important when creating good design? I think it's relative what people draw inspiration from to each their own. But for me to really unlock new levels of meaning, understanding, sensitivity to culture is important to reference. Even at school, architectural school, one of the first things you do is a precedent analysis to understand what has been done before similarly and dissect what worked and what didn't.

You don't want to repeat the same mistakes. So even at a cultural level, if you want to understand what worked, even at a climate level, if you want to understand, okay, this house was built in this way and everyone complains about how hot it is. Some very basic example. You have a plot of land. Your neighbor already has their house built. They know all of the problems they went through in building on the site. How could you not ask a question? It only makes sense.

how could you not ask a question it only makes sense like you you want to arm yourself with as much knowledge as you can about the space that you're going to create in so i think referencing and understanding um precedents whether it be heritage-based social economic geology soil is really your first step to be done i I feel like I have such a clear sense of what someone should take away if they are starting a construction project and wanting to think about the principles that they should use when they're building their own home. And I also feel like no matter where you are,

whether you own a home, don't own a home, plan on ever building something or not, I think everyone clearly has this idea you are, whether you own a home, don't own a home, plan on ever building something or not. I think everyone clearly has this idea of the philosophical and intellectual framework and why that is so important. What are some of the practical things that someone should do if they're not directly in this process of designing and building a home? What are the things that people should apply to their life? Architecturally, right? For anyone listening, go to the source, go to the sites, go to the place that you're looking to create this new thing. Sit there for a while, you know, watch the sun pass, you know, feel the winds, see how the rain falls. Is there a bird's nest

somewhere and birds are chirping? Who else is occupying this space? What's the ecology of this place? Its personality? Only by doing that, I think, can you really get an understanding of the energy, the spirit, the vibe of the place. So if you can, always go. Sit there, stand there for a little bit and just take it in. If you apply that to life, again, go to source. If that is something deep inside you, if that is God, an external entity,

sit with it and try to listen to what it's telling you. Or go within yourself and listen to what your voice is telling you. Get still for a moment. And so I'd say that's number one. Number two, I think having the courage to plot your own course, design your own workflow, design your own approach to a project or to life. What I've learned is that there are no rules, really. It's up to you to decide where you want to stick your claim on dignity. You know, where does your authenticity lie? What drives you

as either a designer, a dad, a kid that's trying to figure it out, wherever you are in life. There really are no rules. And if someone tells you there are rules, they're rules that have been fabricated and put in place maybe for organization or whatever. But underneath all of that, there's you deciding what you will and won't do, how you will do it, and how you won't do it. What you envision the outcome to be and what you don't want it to be, that's on you. That's up to you to create that process. And I guess three, since you said three, be open and flexible to how you get to that end goal. Again, even in architecture, I might have this beautiful vision. It's so holistic. It makes sense. It impacts positively so many different people. it's sustainable, it's everything you could ever want

in a project, it might be too expensive or it might just not be what the client wants to do. So it's my job to understand that this is the end goal we want to get to, but there are many ways that that can happen. A hurricane can come knock you over. Somebody could come do something bad to you. These things happen and they're terrible and they hurt and they devastate. But if we can find that resilience in ourselves to remember the vision, we always find our way back. When it comes to thinking about some of these unpredictable disasters and ways in which our lives are going to get affected, predictable disasters and ways in which our lives are going to get affected. Is there anything that non-architects can do to use design to make their world or their specific homes better and more resilient? And just to make it even more specific, one of the producers who works on this show, Noor, every time it rains really hard in New York City, her basement floods. So as someone who can't like, you know,

make a big construction project, are there things that you can do to avoid situations like that or to make it so that they're less extreme or less damaging? Yeah, I think that's such a beautiful question because it could, we could go in like so many different extremes. But for me, it's about, you know, I enjoy sleeping at night. You know, I take great joy in being able to lay my head on a pillow and feel like I've done as least harm as I can to as many people as possible. Even if I start there, what does that look like? I think the first thing that you could do as a person is decide, how do I want to live my life? decide how do I want to live my life you know where does my line stop very simple things could be catching rainwater when it falls it could be having a garden at home and I have like my fruits and vegetables here without pesticides that I grow with compost it could be I choose to get low flow water fixtures in my home. You know, I choose to put an aerator

on my shower so that it's less gallons per minute. You know, it could be that I am developing 20 acres of hotel property on this site and I'm going to implement ecological practices that I don't cause any harm to the marine protected area, you know, two miles off the coast. It could be anything, but it should be something. It feels to me like the Caribbean and Barbados and many of the other islands have obviously experienced so much of the dark history of colonization and of slavery and of inequality. But there's also so many people, yourself high among them, who are really designing this hopeful future and coming up with new alternatives and new ways that we can move forward. One of the other things that I found really interesting is, you know, the way that you think about architecture and design, but also in the on the island of

Barbuda, right on Barbuda there, they have a whole different approach to land to the idea of like communal ownership, and that maybe we don't have to think about like private property in exactly the same ways. And so I wonder if you have any thoughts on that on the Barbuda land acts and that whole idea of like, maybe we actually shouldn't own private property and instead it should be communal? I think the one thing that people tend to overlook when they talk about slavery and the impacts of slavery and wanting to move on and change the conversation is that because it's not physically happening, there's still a legacy of the impact that that has had. And Barbados, for example, Barbados was the slave codes were written here. The policies that went on to become successful in the rest of the Americas, they were formed, tested, optimized here. So there's a deep level of healing that is subtle, but needs to happen,

particularly in my country, I think, because we were in the English speaking region, you know, even down to South America, North America, everyone passed through Barbados first before they were disseminated across to the other countries. That legacy of being ground zero, of being the headquarters of the policies that still exist, are rooted in this. The issues that we have around land ownership, there is still a legacy of slavery. There are still plantations here owned by families that have ties to slavery. So there's this whole complex issue that we still have that I don't know if a change in policy would, one, be easy, two, easily accepted accepted, or three even welcomed. You don't know until you start to ask the questions. But I think before we get to that point, there's a level of national healing and conversation, open conversation that needs to happen. I think currently our Prime Minister has

started those conversations in the form of reparation requests. But of course, that word in itself brings a huge other set of contention. But I think having the conversations openly, understanding that, yes, we are generations removed from that, but there's still legacies of it that are unjust. And having that in a way that people don't feel, people will feel offended, but are still open to listening and responding and taking accountability for it. I think before we get to that point of policy around it,

that has to happen first. It's so clear talking to you and having done research and listened to other talks and interviews that you've given, it's so clear the pride of place that you have in being from the Caribbean, in being Bajan, in living in the place that you do with your family around you. And so I'd love to just hear, what are some of your favorite parts of Barbados and of living in the specific place where you live? I love, well, the whole island, I mean. But I got a special soft spot for the East Coast.

The West Coast is a lot more developed now. We call it the Platinum Coast. You'll find like really luxury houses. You know, lots of celebrities come and they they have houses there but I always have a soft spot for the east coast it's a little more rugged you know you could feel feel the earth beneath you one of my favorite things about Barbados is just knowing how it came to be it's not volcanic like the other islands. And we were literally pushed from the bottom of the ocean floor. You know, we sit on a different tectonic plate being so easterly

to the rest of the islands that we've literally been pushed from the bottom of the ocean. I mean, how poetic is that? And you can see in our layers of geological makeup the history of the ocean you know we're like 85 percent um place to see limestone or something like that so talking about being from the water being born from the water the connection particularly as black people that we have to the water we were brought across the ocean. There's this whole language around water that permeates our culture. Just understanding all of that and how connected I feel to it is probably one of my most favorite things.

Well, Alyssa Moore, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. I really genuinely, we could do like 17 more episodes just talking, but I'm really glad that we got to do one. So thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was what I needed right now. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human.

Thank you so much to today's guest, Alyssa Amore Gibbons. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by a team that metaphorically opens the windows to let the wind blow through safely. Daniela Balarezo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Structural Pillars of Integrity, Julia Dickerson, and Mateus Salas. This episode was fact-checked by Structural Pillars of Integrity, Julia Dickerson, and Mateus Salas. On the PRX side, our show was assembled on a solid foundation and bolted together by Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening and making this show possible.

If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review. If you're listening on Spotify, check out the discussion question that we've put up on the mobile app. We would love to hear your thoughts. No matter where you're listening, please share our show with someone who you think would enjoy it. Recommendations are the number one way that we get out to new people. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week.