As in the natural world, creating evolutionary processes involves selection - natural selection, and selection involves compromise. The dominant architectural schools of thought of both the Global North and South of now centuries have placed a high value on material conservation and constancy. Historically, and for as long as we have archaeological, written, and other records, indigenous and vernacular architectures have integrated features that help to mitigate local environmental threats in passive, renewable, and generally sustainable ways, of which two examples include the stilted villages of South East Asia and the built-to-burn wickiups of the South West Coast of America. Over many generations our ancestors observed the many cycles of the places they inhabited and came up with solutions that enabled them to not only live with fire, floods, aridity, storms, and more, but in a way that was in sync with local ecologies. But, somewhere along the line much of their architectural knowledge was discarded, as was the ecological and wider environmental literacy that underpinned it. However, neither Panarchistic Architecture nor its several phylums, propose to simply replicate ancient architectural concepts, because for all their many attributes their applications are arguably limited due to the matter that for many it is both impractical and/or undesirable to live and work in buildings of typologies that emerged before the likes of modern-day utilities existed.

Panarchistic Architecture (Ibid.) presented the theoretical framework for designing structures which, synced to the fire regimes of the sites they inhabit, work in symbiosis with local pyrophytes and the complex assemblies they form. A series of tools were created, including building codes, a practice oath, a series of seminal architectural features and components, scenarios, fictions, and other short stories, were integrated into the work by means of enabling architects, urban designers, planners, policymakers, and other built environment practitioners to explore the practical implications of the paradigm. Constituting a succinct summary of the outputs of research undertaken in the decade preceding the publication, these works continue to serve as a general introduction to the research and practice of the paradigm and its conceptual tenets. However, the task of designing to live with wildfire and in turn with the hazards with which it is intimately connected is ongoing, and not least because significant new discoveries, insights, and with them, risks and opportunities are emerging apace. In 2009, Sir John Beddington, spoke of a confluence of environmental and social challenges he called ‘the perfect storm’. Integrating pyrophyte traits including among others pyriscence, pyrogermination, abscission, retardant rhytidome, and resprouting*, the concepts as listed below are conceived to enable architectures to co-exist with variants of ‘the perfect fire storm’ at the advent of a new ‘Fire Age’.