Building the Future: Building Resilience, Climate Adaptation, and Performance Optimization in Extreme Scenarios

The global challenges of the 21st century demand a fundamental rethinking of how we design, build, and operate our infrastructure. We need to move beyond incremental upgrades and commit fully to Building the Future through the lens of comprehensive Resilience, Climate Adaptation, and Performance.



The global imperative to address climate change has fundamentally shifted the focus in the architecture, engineering, and construction sectors. The emphasis has been on energy efficiency, with a focus on minimizing energy consumption. Still, the new paradigm demands integrating resilience and adaptation to ensure the sustained functionality, safety, and habitability of the built environment in the face of escalating climate risks.

Building Resilience moves beyond simple efficiency. It is the capacity of a building system to anticipate, absorb, recover from, and adapt to hazardous events. This concept requires a holistic view that interconnects multiple domains. This analysis outlines the necessary shift from reactive maintenance to proactive Climate Adaptation underpinned by a focus on high-level Performance, ensuring that every investment delivers optimized social, economic, and environmental returns.

This Special Issue seeks to capture the cutting-edge research and interdisciplinary strategies actively shaping this transition, providing the knowledge base needed to design truly sustainable, high-performing, and resilient built environments for the future.

The following are some specific themes that contributors are encouraged to address:

• Resilient Built Environment;
• Thermal Comfort for Buildings;
• Adaptive Building Envelopes and Smart Materials;
• AI-Driven Predictive Resilience Modeling;
• Machine Learning and Surrogate Modeling;
• Resilience and Social Impact;
• Urban Built Environment;
• Building Energy Efficiency;
• Certification, Policy, and Design Integration;
• Multi-domain performance assessment;
• Adaptive Thermal Comfort;
• Building Envelope Resilience;
• Phase-Change Materials (PCMs);
• Natural Ventilation.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: Climate change, Resilience, Energy efficiency, Building energy simulation, Multi-domain, Thermal comfort

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.