Looking, After the Fires

“Looking, After the Fires“ is an ongoing speculative project undertaken
through a Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture at the
American Academy in Rome and a Creative Artists Fellowship from the
Japan-US Friendship Commission in 2025.
Even as unprecedented wildfires ravage the California landscape, small
moments of optimism can be found in elemental ecological reflexes.
Biological processes leverage fire towards rapid, opportunistic endeavors
of regrowth in pursuit of a new vision of ecological succession. These fires
have motivated similar bursts of creative response from human cultural
networks as well, inspiring – perhaps necessitating – new ways to
conceive of ourselves in relation to our landscapes.
Drawing from conversations across disciplines in California, Italy, and
Japan, we have analyzed depictions of post-wildfire landscapes, searching
for ways in which these events provoke new representations of human
relationships to the built environment. The first product of this work is a
reinterpretation of vernacular fire towers of the United States and Japan,
commissioned for the US Pavilion at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka,
Japan, and now on display at the United States Embassy in Tokyo, Japan.
It is a memorial to that which was lost, and a vantage point from which to
watch the spectacular processes of regeneration of our ecosystems. The
firetower was designed for repeated deployments, constructed from
sustainably harvested clear hinoki wood, and assembled without metal
fasteners. It is only by making it possible to imagine continued habitation
after the fires that it becomes possible to live with fire.