The City of Miami Beach is one of the most climate vulnerable cities on planet Earth. In the coming decades the city will have to face the challenges of sea-level rise combined with yearly threats of hurricanes, king tides, and tropical rain downpours that can dump as much as five inches of water on the city in one afternoon. Under the umbrella of CRUNCH (Climate Resilient Urban Nexus Choices) this first volume looks at designing building structures that can act as hybrids sitting in, out, or under the water with the ability to be self-sustaining.

This book features ten different approaches each envisioning and testing self-sufficient, adaptive, and resilient hybrid structures benchmarked against 100% carbon-neutrality using calibrated Autodesk Building Information Modelling (BIM) through cloud engines in Green Building Studio (GBS), Insight 360, Dynamo-Grasshopper, EnergyPlus, and eQuest toolsets. All research designs were based on approximately 80-year scenarios in which modeling by NOAA, NASA, and reinsurance companies places much of the City of Miami Beach’s existing infrastructure under water. The research focuses on a low-lying area called Lake Pancoast on Indian Creek in Miami Beach that is currently undergoing a massive city-led infrastructure transformation to raise roads, install storm water management systems, and a proposed living shoreline. Based on this “living shoreline” strategy of biotechnological, adaptive ecosystems such as mangroves, oysters and coral clusters, projects were developed as part of a bigger citywide program to combat sea level rise.