Panarchistic Architecture pamphlet

‘evading’, and ‘resisting’: a tri-part paradigmatic approach to the problem of living with wildfire.

The proposal

© Bioratorium Limited & Melissa Sterry 2020 All Rights Reserved

Panarchistic Architecture proposes that the wildland urban interface is populated by architecture and urban infrastructure which, modelled on fireadapted flora that is native to the regional fire regimes, coevolves with the ‘rhythms’ of those regimes. Both materially and informatically, and conceptually and technically, the proposed WUI schema synthesises architectural and urban systems with ecological and wider Earth systems, such that the biochemistry, behaviours, and overall functioning of the former are synchronous to those of the latter.

Key principles

Panarchistic Architecture

• Architectural renewal processes synchronised to the frequency of the local historical fire regime.

A proposal for the reconciliation of human and nonhuman systems at the wildland-urban-interface.

• Pyric cycle as catalyst of both biological and architectural evolution.

• Configured to systemically accommodate of both human and environmental needs.

Learn more

Within this speculative biomimetic schema, buildings, like the pyrophytic species upon which they are modelled, comprise functional traits that are selected to persist in the presence of one of the three qualitatively distinct fire regime types - lowseverity, mixed-severity, and high-severity - and their respective fire frequencies, intensities, and behaviours. Thus, pyrophytes are construed as architectural ‘prototypes’, which the product of epochs of evolution, exhibit tried and tested means by which to mitigate the ‘problem’ of ‘living with wildfire’.

First published as a PhD thesis accompanied by specualtive works including building codes, scenarios, and ficitons, the potentialities of Panarchistic Architecture are being further explored through an independent research and publishing programme incorporating publications, lectures, interviews, podcasts, and more. Find out more at www.panarchiccodex.com.

Panarchistic Architecture’s pyrophytic mimeticmodes are enabled through the potentialities inherent in both current and emerging electronic, biological, and hybridized sensing, actuating, analysis, networking, and storage technologies. The latter, when integrated with material, engineering, and design systems, which, from the molecular-level upwards, are likewise modelled on pyrophytes, presents the possibility of creating persistence to wildfires through strategies classed as ‘enduring’,

Image: Panarchistic Archtecture founder Dr. Sterry giving the closing keynote at the Understanding Risk Balkans conference, 2018.

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“Having described everything that exists as a result of man’s talent for making art copy Nature, I marvel to think that scarcely anything is brought to a finished state without the involvement of fire.” Pliny The Elder

At the interface Situated in a yet to be established transdisciplinary field Panarchistic Architecture presents a radical new proposal for building resilience to one of the most complex, contentious and contested challenges of our time - wildfire at the wildland-urban interface.

The problem A highly complex phenomena coupled with not one, but several Earth systems, human actions are both directly and indirectly changing wildfire frequencies, intensities, severities, and behaviours, and to the detriment of both environment and society. Nowhere is this felt more so than the wildland urban interface.

A place where fire-averse architectures meet increasingly fire-prone lands, loss of lives, properties, and livelihoods to a series of wildfire complexes of proportions unprecedented in living memory underpin the now urgent need to reconsider the challenge of living with wildfire as a vital landscape process.

Positing a paradigm Residing at the apex of Earth systems, wildfire is integral to the reproductive processes of the biota of several forest, shrub, and grassland biome-types. Multiple factors signalling the advent of a new ‘fire age’, Panarchistic Architecture takes the task of living with wildfire back to the design drawing board, asking not how we, humans, would solve the problem, but how fireadapted flora already have.

© Bioratorium Limited & Melissa Sterry 2020 All Rights Reserved

Converging the state-of-the-knowledge from fields as diverse as the fire, ecological, and wider Earth sciences; etech and biotech information, communication and computing technologies; evolutionary, smart and living materials, architectures, and urban systems, and more, Panarchistic Architecture presents a wildland urban interface paradigm modelled on the biochemistries, behaviours, relationships, and systems of fire-adapted flora (pyrophytes) and the fire regimes (patterns, frequencies, and intensities) they collectively form.

Images: [Far left] August Complex and Zogg Fire, California, US, 2020 processed by Pierre Markuse using Copernicus Sentinal data [Left and Cover] Fossilised cone (Picea. sp) dated to the Miocene. [Above] Microscopic slice of carbonised wood from an ancient forest fire dated to the Late Triassic [237 – 201.3 (+/- 0.2) mya]. Both sepcimens from Dr. Sterry’s personal specimen collection.

This text is extracted from ‘Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory’, 2018.