9.9 Pânadigm: where missing middles meet

“It would obviously take some getting accustomed, I think, if it should be a matter of taking into one’s eyes that which is up there outside the cave.” Plato, 381BC.

We, humanity, not gods, but mortals of whom the existence is but a by-product of the advent of fire on this, the only flammable planet in the Solar System, and quite possibly Universe, have lived through many fire ages. While we know not when, or where a member of our Hominin kind first lit a now mythological ‘fennel stalk’, we know the act thereof changed not merely the course of our genus, but of the planet. But, only now is the possible extent of the ‘Promethean price’ we may ultimately pay for the ‘theft’ of the ‘control’ of fire becoming apparent. Though many are the peoples and the places as may pay that price, few may more so than they that live at the interface of fire-prone wild and urban lands, they being lands in which the fire frequencies, intensities, and severities are escalating with such speed and at such scale as to have increased by a magnitude of order within the duration it took to research and write this thesis [145]. They will likely do so again before it goes to print. Both in the years immediately preceding this endeavour, and during the term thereof, the veritable ‘laureates’ of the wildfire research community have fired multiple metaphorical equivalents of S.O.S flares, their message clear and concise, that being that transdisciplinary research endeavour as incorporates the many and the complex issues that wildfire presents need be commenced and with urgency.

In regions including, but not limited to the western United States, ‘living with fire’ comes not with an ‘opt out’ clause. Present since primeval times, wildfire is so integral to the landscape as for its molecular signature to be both engrained in its geology and in the reproductive processes of its indigenous plants. The original peoples that inhabited the landscape, Native Americans, have lived in synergy with fire and its regimes since prior to the inaugural ‘Ur-ban’ revolution. Though archaic, their architectures, of which the materiality cycles in sync with the fire season, work in ways indefinitely environmentally sustainable: sourcing local abundant materials which upon their degradation and redistribution upon the passing of wildfire pose not toxic or other threat to local, regional, or global ecologies. The paradigmatic premise of these architectures is a product of Native American values, beliefs, and practices that mirror they of other indigenous peoples about the world. Perceiving of both themselves, and of all peoples as not apart, but integral to abiotic and biotic systems, indigenous peoples teach systemic understanding of these systems to their young through pedagogical practice, including the telling of origin of fire, and other socio- ecological relational myths, and on the part of not merely parents and teachers, but whole communities. Both practically and philosophically, from they, the pioneers of architectures as cyclic biochemical process in which material destruction is the catalyst for conceptual and material creation, much may the built environment community of the Global North have to learn.

Evolution, not an act of material, but information acquisition, the Panarchistic paradigm proposes of an inversion of the value relations between architecture and environment of both the wildland urban interface of the western United States present, and the wider predominant architectural and urban narrative of Western architecture since the late 17th century, and more specifically, since the Great Fire of London. The event thereof catalysed a transition from principally biomass to mineral construction materials not merely locally, but globally. Simultaneously, the event birthed the first fire insurance industry, which in concert with the material transition fuelled an architectural approach which assumed there to be indefinite longevity to the relevance of architectural schema, at both the building and urban scale, wherein upon destruction by fire, flood, earthquake, or otherwise, homes, districts, and entire cities have, in the fashion of a House of Cards, been rebuilt over and again, the problem therein not the renewal itself, but the material-process thereof. One of the foremost energy and material intensive industries worldwide, the construction sector faces an ecological, ethical, and commercial imperative to re-examine its business models and all as is produced therefrom, for it’s not just the long-term sustainability of buildings that hangs in the balance, but of the economic viability of methods of production thereof.

The architectural thinking, practice, and codes as presented in this thesis may, on the surface, seem radical, but they are derived from solutions to the ‘problem’ of living with wildfire that predate not merely our species, but our entire taxonomic order, and by over 350,000,000 years. Thus, they are, as it were, ‘tried and tested’, and in ‘in natura’, and within scenarios every bit as complex, diverse, and stochastic as the phenomena at the ‘apex of Earth systems’ presents: they are, in the true Grecian meaning of the word, ‘Pân’ architectural propositions. Ours now the capacity to quantify and qualify the outcomes of fire-persistence evolutionary ‘experiments’ as first emerged eons before ourselves, and through numerous fields of scientific and technological endeavor, to extrapolate and replicate elements thereof, provides of a veritable cornucopia of hybridized human and non-human systems possibilities: a socio-ecological reconciliation, which, interstitial philosophically and physically, conceptually and technically, bridges the not one, but several gaps as constitute “the missing middle”.

>Continue to References here.

Footnotes

[145] Bringing perspective to the statement thereof, during the period it took to draw this thesis to its final conclusions, the Ranch Fire burned through 410, 203 acres (CALFIRE 2018e), and in the process displaced the Cedar Fire as the largest wildfire by acreage on Californian [modern] record, and by a margin of over 33%.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.