Roads to architectural adaptation: Approaches and mind-sets in climate change adaptation of sustainable residential architecture

Climate change adaptations in new buildings must reconcile mitigation with resilience and adaptation, to obtain a truly sustainable architecture. Extensive literature studies reveal a multitude of approaches to climate adaptation worldwide that has been defined as either hard or soft based on the flexibility and economy of their implementations, or as human adaptations, based on behavior and physiology. This paper investigates architectural and engineering approaches to climate change adaptations in oceanic climates and rationalizes them within a framework that may serve as point of departure for future residential architecture. Overall approaches fall into either defensive, reactive or embedded strategies. Defensive strategies are mostly passive solutions that entrench the building from the extremes of climate change. Reactive solutions actively engage the climatic impacts and dynamically change the architecture to respond accordingly. Embedded architecture engage with ecology and landscape to enhance the natural resilience of the site and adapt in depth.