Fire is a powerful and transformative process, a metaphor for energy, hope, renewal, destruction, and creativity in the collective psyche. Throughout history, humans have been grappling with fire’s duality as a force that both creates and destroys. Today, fire poses a mounting existential threat that demands attention and action. As designers, we must confront how landscape interventions can both harness and evade the transformative power of fire. How can these interventions apply, contain, and control fire in the landscape?

Led by James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie of San Francisco-based international landscape architecture firm Surfacedesign, this studio will examine the theme of fire through a multi-disciplinary lens encompassing the practical, environmental, aesthetic, and symbolic.

This studio will focus its inquiry of fire on the Napa Valley region in California. The studio will explore the interplay of art, agriculture, architecture, ecology, landscape, restoration, and rewilding, while reinterpreting the relationship to fire at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is a cultural institution and arts incubator founded by Rene and Veronica di Rosa. A pioneering Figurative and Funk Art collector drawn to emerging artists whose work often had a humorous bent, Rene di Rosa was an early supporter of Northern California artists including Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Nathan Oliveira, Viola Frey, and Ron Nagle.

Students will reimagine the future of this eccentric Northern California art and nature preserve through the lens of fire, examining the ecological, cultural, and aesthetic reflections thereof. Building off Rene di Rosa’s legacy as an outsider, students will look for alternatives through design. Using the site as a laboratory, students will seek different models for fire management and site design, deconstructing and challenging current thinking about how we incorporate art within the landscape. Can art and landscape provide an imaginative and speculative vision for the future hand in hand with design? This studio will ask students to suggest a speculative reworking of how fire, art, and landscape meet.

Students will examine the impact and potential of fire in Northern California through a series of four discrete and interconnected modules:

The first module is a personal design exercise: a shelter embracing fire.

The second module includes the studio trip to the Bay Area and the Napa Valley. The purpose of this trip is to gain full exposure to the character, climate, and culture of the Northern California landscape. Students will meet a diverse range of local experts on the topic of fire and how it has impacted their lives. Students will be expected to document their experiences.

The third module asks students to work in groups to create a stewardship plan of the site that considers fire as a point of inspiration for the design. Students are encouraged to find alternative methods to convey design ideas.

For the final project, students will work individually to create a site-specific intervention, inventing a new typology that combines fire research, contemporary art, and land.

This design-focused studio will be open to Landscape Architecture and Architecture students; however, there will be a strong emphasis on engagement with the landscape.