Welcome to the interface…
A proposal for the reconciliation of human and non-human systems
“few tackle the difficult land-use issue of where and how humans choose to build their communities in the first place. The prospect of widely increasing fire activity with climate change intensifies the need of a new path forward”.
— Moritz et al, 2014
Positing a paradigm
Situated in a yet to be “established” field (Smith et al, 2016), this site and the works it hosts explore one of the most complex and contentious challenges or our time - the problem of living with wildfire on an “inherently” flammable planet” (Bowman et al, 2011).
Residing at the apex of Earth systems, wildfire has been integral to the development of much terrestrial plant and animal life on Earth. But, its role in the evolution of our own lineage - Primates, and latterly Humans - is arguably the most compelling, curious, and currently, crucial of all.
Multiple factors signalling the advent of a new “fire age” (Pyne, 2016), the paradigm presented here takes the task of living with wildfire back to the design drawing board, asking not how we, humans, would solve the problem, but how fire-adapted flora already have.
PANARCHISTIC ARCHITECTURE
Building Wildland Urban-Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes modelled on Ecological Systems Theory.
Images: Fossilised cone (Picea. sp) dated to the Miocene and found in a coal deposit at Konin, Poland., and a leaf skeleton, both items from the author’s personal specimen collection.
“Even today fire continues to stand for what is uniquely human – traits not cached as fossils, a technology of process and behaviour, not one of material artefacts...”
— Pyne and Pyne, 2012.