Designing To Avoid Disaster by Thomas Fisher

Designing To Avoid Disaster by Thomas Fisher

Recent catastrophic events, such as the I-35W bridge collapse, New Orleans flooding, the BP oil spill, Port au Prince's destruction by earthquake, Fukushima nuclear plant's devastation by tsunami, the Wall Street investment bank failures, and the housing foreclosure epidemic and the collapse of housing prices, all stem from what author Thomas Fisher calls fracture-critical design. This is design in which structures and systems have so little redundancy and so much interconnectedness and misguided efficiency that they fail completely if any one part does not perform as intended. If we, as architects, planners, engineers, and citizens are to predict and prepare for the next disaster, we need to recognize this error in our thinking and to understand how design thinking provides us with a way to anticipate unintended failures and increase the resiliency of the world in which we live. In Designing to Avoid Disaster, the author discusses the context and cultural assumptions that have led to a number of disasters worldwide, describing the nature of fracture-critical design and why it has become so prevalent. He traces the impact of fracture-critical thinking on everything from our economy and politics to our educational and infrastructure systems to the communities, buildings, and products we inhabit and use everyday. And he shows how the natural environment and human population itself have both begun to move on a path toward a fracture-critical collapse that we need to do everything possible to avoid. We designed our way to such disasters and we can design our way out of them, with a number of possible solutions that Fisher provides.

"In this essential book Fisher takes us through ‘fracture-critical’ design failures and provides solutions by articulating how ‘resilient design’ is the key to our longevity as a speciesThe research behind this theory spans many disciplines though the writing is accessible to all. This is required reading for designers, planners, politicians and citizens."

Michael Zaretsky, architect and associate professor, University of Cincinnati, Ohio

"Tom Fisher challenges us to think about disasters in a new way: not as the inevitable result of nature, but rather, problems that we can design our way out of. We, and the environments we create, are not the victims of circumstance. We can save ourselves through informed design and make a new world that rewards intelligence and foresight. In this book, Fisher throws us a life preserver of design. "

Michael J. Crosbie, architecture critic and associate dean, University of Hartford, Connecticut

After two Christian tours of the Holy Land led by his pastor, The Rev. Frederick R. Gutekunst, in 1978 and 1985, Thomas Fisher decided to write this chronicle of some of the many persons great and small who visited Jerusalem over the course of thirty-eight centuries.
Thomas made his living before retirement in a technical field, but in the research for this book he drew on his studies of world history at Fairleigh Dickinson University, from Bible studies, and from every book he could find about Jerusalem.
Although most historians probably don't regard the Bible as reliable history, Dr. Werner Keller's 1963 landmark book, The Bible As History In Pictures, contains an historical account of the Assyrians' siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E. that seems to corroborate exactly the depiction of the event in II Kings 18:1-19:37. Thomas also found valuable resources in the magazines Biblical Archaeology Review and Archaeology.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780415527361
ISBN 10	0415527368
Titel	Designing To Avoid Disaster
Autor	Thomas Fisher
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Taylor & Francis Ltd
Erscheinungsjahr	2012-08-28
Seitenanzahl	258
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar