Routledge chapter

In print November 11th 2024, Panarchistic Architecture: A Paradigm in Wildfire Resilience by Melissa Sterry in The Routledge Companion to Smart Design Thinking in Architecture & Urbanism for a Sustainable, Living Planet.

Abstract:

Multiple factors signalling the advent of a new ‘Fire age’, the Panarchistic Architecture paradigm 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.

Evolved from an extensive, first of its kind, several-year long transdisciplinary study, the paradigm posits resilience to major wildfires through the creation of complex adaptive architectural and urban systems that mimic the biochemistry, behaviours, and relationships of indigenous flora and fauna species in the low-, mixed-, and high-severity fire regimes. Its constructs drawing on the natural world for model, method, and medium, its proposed means of enablement hybridise human and non-human material and information systems, by splicing biocomputing, satellite communications, and artificial at the edge of science, technology, and engineering.