Abstract :
[en] ### Abstract
Buildings are entering a period in which traditional performance objectives centered on annual energy efficiency are becoming insufficient to address the realities of climate change, urbanization, infrastructure electrification, and increasing climate extremes. This lecture explores the transition from high-performance buildings toward climate-resilient and adaptive urban systems capable of maintaining comfort, functionality, and safety under uncertain future conditions.
The presentation argues that future building performance assessment must move beyond deterministic assumptions and annual metrics to incorporate hourly resilience, passive survivability, uncertainty quantification, adaptive operation, and infrastructure interactions. Particular attention is given to the limitations of conventional design approaches under prolonged heatwaves, grid disruptions, and rapidly changing climate conditions. The concept of passive survivability is introduced through metrics such as indoor operative temperature drift, cooling autonomy, blackout habitability, thermal lag, and humidity resilience, supported by passive design strategies including optimized window-to-wall ratios, thermal zoning, low internal loads, thermal mass, phase change materials, adaptive shading, mixed-mode ventilation, night ventilation, and radiant cooling.
The lecture further examines how electrification is transforming the relationship between buildings and energy systems. While heat pumps, electric mobility, and renewable energy integration offer significant decarbonization potential, they also introduce new infrastructure vulnerabilities through synchronized peak loads and increased dependence on electrical networks. This emerging electrification paradox highlights the need for intelligent coordination between buildings, districts, and energy systems.
A central theme is the evolution from isolated buildings toward interconnected climate-adaptive urban ecosystems. Buildings are increasingly becoming thermal batteries that provide flexibility through thermal storage, predictive operation, demand shifting, and district-level energy exchange. The presentation discusses how artificial intelligence, digital twins, and physics-informed machine learning are reshaping simulation, control, and decision-making processes by enabling continuous sensing, forecasting, optimization, and adaptation across multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Special emphasis is placed on hot humid tropical climates, where rapid urbanization, increasing cooling demand, elevated humidity levels, and intensified urban heat island effects create particularly challenging resilience conditions. These regions provide a valuable lens through which to understand future cooling-dominated urban environments and the growing need for adaptive climate-responsive infrastructure.
Finally, the lecture introduces the concept of cognitive climate-adaptive cities, where buildings, energy networks, mobility systems, urban microclimates, digital twins, and human behavior operate as integrated cyber-physical systems. In this vision, cities continuously sense, predict, learn, and adapt under uncertainty, transforming resilience from a building-scale objective into a city-scale operational capability. The presentation concludes that climate resilience is no longer solely an engineering challenge but is becoming one of the defining infrastructure and governance challenges of the twenty-first century.
