COTE Books
Please consider joining the COTE Book Talk with Meg Calkins and Shawn Swisher on June 18, 2026, 1-2pm ET: Register here. Thank you to AIA Minnesota COTE for hosting. Get 20% off the book with the code 26AEV1 at the Routledge site through June 2026.
Design for Resilience
Details and Materials for Resilient Sites: A Climate Positive Approach by Meg Calkins
Book Review by Shawn Swisher, AIA, LEED AP BD+C
In daily practice, detail drawings are too frequently deferred to the final stages of design, the product of many months of conceptualizing, scrutinizing, negotiating, and, finally, documenting. Under the constraints of budget and schedule, they emerge not as drivers but as a residual act that follows design resolution. And yet, when successful, the design process culminates in drawings that describe the design so meticulously that they belie the complexity—and compromises—of their creation. Similarly, the discourse around climate change is so expansive that our design work at the scale of our drawings feels inconsequential compared to the problems we seek to address. When we find ourselves doubting our capacity to rise to this occasion, it is work like Details and Materials for Resilient Sites: A Climate Positive Approach by Meg Calkins (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2025) that emboldens us to charge on. It endows us with knowledge that rigorously bridges the scientific and the practical in our designs.
This is the third book on sustainable site design principles by Meg Calkins, a landscape architect and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University. A central throughline in her work is the development of frameworks that reveal the interconnectedness between our designs and our world and provide landscape architects and their collaborators with the tools to navigate them. Part textbook and part manual, with a dash of manifesto, Details begins by building the connection between the carbon cycle and the built environment, tracing the sources of emissions heating the planet. Calkins goes on to illustrate the implications of materials manufacturing and construction, including readily available alternatives and emerging technologies to lessen them. This includes carbon accounting for each material and system with calculated embodied carbon figures, elevating our understanding of each material’s nature beyond an abstract notion of its footprint.
Beyond the environmental impacts, Calkins explores the broader social issues of our supply chain – the sobering truths of pollution, chemical exposure, and forced labor still endemic in parts of the world where many materials are sourced or manufactured. In our role as designers, we are reduced to mere consumers of the products in the marketplace, often ill-equipped to upend the indecencies of their making. Yet Calkins thoughtfully catalogs the efforts of many organizations to uproot the infrastructure embedded in generations of extractive production. As an overview of site detailing and the consequences of those material choices, the exhaustiveness of the book’s data and resources is where it unexpectedly shines, going so far as to itemize nearly every organization, code, or framework that informs the current state of each material’s ecosystem.
The book’s main argument is most salient when it speaks to the pragmatism of practice, outlining the benefits and challenges for a wide range of materials in site design, including thoroughly enumerated design considerations, case studies, and details to support professionals in deploying these strategies directly into their work. Calkins is measured in her analysis, balancing design priorities such as durability, constructability, and beauty to inform readers of the true costs of these decision points.
Seeing detailed drawings composed and compared, each annotated with its embodied carbon, lends traction to the work's larger purpose as a practical tool, even as it underscores the necessity of broader industry engagement to make the leaps forward we are existentially obliged to seek. This reframing of practice as a global ripple affirms what is clearly the heart of the book: that design decisions at even the smallest of scales should not be seen as technical afterthoughts, but as central to an ethical practice that actively seeks a climate-responsive approach to design. It is a recommitment made with each new stroke of the drawing, and a force that can change the world for the better.
Near the end of the book’s preface, Calkins calmly asserts that, “Now is the time we must work together for substantive change.” With Details and Materials for Resilient Sites in hand, that work begins in the details.
Shawn Swisher, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, is an architect and Senior Associate at Jones Studio in Tempe, Arizona. He views architecture as a form of stewardship—of the environment, the profession, and the communities it serves. Shawn serves as Chair of the City of Tempe Sustainability & Resilience Commission. He has also taught design studios at the University of Arizona and served as a guest critic at UofA, Arizona State University, USC, and UC Berkeley. He is the co-creator and co-host of the podcast Tracing Architecture and received the AIA Arizona AIA10 Award in 2023 for contributions to the profession through design, service, and advocacy.
COTE Books is a production of the AIA Committee on the Environment Knowledge Community in cooperation with local and state COTE groups (part of the COTE Network), which host the virtual talks. We typically review and host talks about a few books per year: If you are interested in being a host or suggesting a book, contact Kira Gould at kiragould@kiragould.com.