In Villalba, Puerto Rico, a small town on a remote mountainside in the path of Hurricane Maria, it took months for power and water to come back to some homes after the storm slammed into the island. The infrastructure is still fragile, and access to tap water still sometimes disappears for days at a time.
Now, architects plan to build a community of resilient homes in the town that can better weather future storms. The houses can work off the grid, without any municipal services, for one to three months, depending on the number of occupants, says Jonathan Marvel, founder of Marvel Architects, a firm based in both New York and Puerto Rico that designed the new houses.
