South Florida is the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of climate change

As part of its series “The Business of Climate Change,” which highlights the climate views of business men and women throughout the state, The Invading Sea spoke with Jeffrey Huber, principal and director of planning, landscape architecture and urban design at Brooks + Scarpa and director of the Florida Atlantic University School of Architecture.

As a native Floridian as well as an architect and landscape architect, how has climate change affected South Florida?

Hurricane Andrew was a fundamental point in my life. It’s actually what got me interested in architecture, and to see from one morning to the next just complete and utter devastation — it was kind of a shock of what Mother

Nature did.

And now we are in this 30 years later, and I’ve seen pretty interesting changes. When you see a street flooding because of king tide events, because it’s just the infrastructure working in reverse, that’s not normal. So you are seeing things clearly as evidence.

We are seeing that we are living in this kind of Anthropocene now, that we as a human species are obviously creating some of these changes. But South Florida in particular is unique because it is the canary in the coal mine. We are seeing global changes happening at a local level.

We talk about the heat. It’s getting worse. It’s also getting saltier. It’s getting saltier because of the saltwater intrusion. We’re seeing well fields that I know were in use as a kid are now being shut down.

(There are) other data sets that there’s a change in the pattern of our weather. We are now getting less frequent rainstorms, but we’re getting more rain in those less storms, so we are getting what some call rain bombs, some call the 100-year storm events.

How have climate-related issues changed how architecture is taught? How is it different now that you are a professor compared to when you were a student?

Education has, in fact, changed. That’s been 30 years, 20 years ago. The education now, we know a lot more. (Teaching was) based on passive design practices when I went through school.

So the idea of cross-ventilation, the idea of orientation, the idea of maximizing the way in which you use breeze blocks, you know, all of those things, the kind of framework that architecture could do for you.

I think those things are coming back heavier and quite frankly, I think they need to be baked into our code. To have a building that cannot open a window in our environment is, to me, illegal.

Students now are having to learn modeling techniques. Our computational modeling programs have become interesting. We had to do it in my time as a kind of, you know, it’s like your grandparents kind of just knew things.

We had basic ideas of models and we just knew that they worked; there were rules. Now, there’s so many programs that allow for you … to expand on those rules. You can stick your 3D computer model now into a program, and it will do a solar radiation study for you. It will determine if the wind and how the wind will react on the building and will determine how water and flooding react on your building