Something in the wind.

Last week, an architect whose firm had just won a major award gave a guided a tour of a building that was a large reason for the honor.

“We wanted to open the building to the street,” the story went, “to bring town and gown together.” We were outside.

“Yes, the road is ugly and unpleasant now,” the architect shouted, her voice barely audible above the roar of passing lorries, buses and cars . . . a never-ending stream. She gestured to expanses of glass and pivoting floor-to-ceiling doors, all closed tight.

“But cars are going disappear,” she said, “or they’ll become electric, so that will change.”

Maybe so. But probably not in my lifetime—or hers. The diesel-powered bus that carried us to the tour was brand new, an expensive and luxurious German model, a behemoth likely to roam the earth for another thirty years.

This was the same week that the British Isles and the western coast of Europe saw not one but two major Atlantic cyclones. Storm Dennis, a huge “bomb cyclone,” was the earth’s largest recorded non-tropical hurricane. It came on the heels of Storm Ciara, itself a doozy.

As Storm Dennis approached, a passenger jetliner broke all records for a non-supersonic Atlantic air crossing, riding on a jet stream of velocities never seen. The Boeing 747 made it from London to New York in under five hours.

“Call me an optimist,” said a man next to me on the building tour, “but I think people are really starting to get it. You know, the transition!”

It turned out that he was thinking about a world without internal combustion engines in passenger vehicles, a planet without big diesel engines. But that prospect seemed far-fetched from where we stood; much less plausible than the vanishing of horse-drawn carriages might have seemed in the London or New York City of 1900.

A different transition seemed more likely: our inexorable passage into a world of routine extreme weather—wind gusts of 80 miles per hour in central Paris, with ocean swells reaching 130 feet in height just two hours away, and record-busting rainfalls with every new weekend.

Increasingly, people who design and construct buildings will be asked to cope with the climate transition, much as they might prefer to thwart it by curbing carbon emissions. Call me a pessimist, but those pivoting glass doors seem destined to remain shut for a long time to come.