This January, we were reminded — once again — that climate change is not a theory but a reality here in California. As temperatures rise and droughts worsen, wildfires rage through our state with increasing frequency and devastation. Many of us who were previously lucky enough not to know someone who lost their house to a wildfire are no longer so. Another grim fact we were reminded of this January: Fire season is no longer seasonal. It’s year-round.
For architects who work in places like Santa Barbara, fire-resilient design is nothing new. We know how to design houses to minimize the risk of catching fire and equip them with systems that help extinguish those that do catch. There are passive approaches like creating defensible spaces that prevent fire from spreading across the yard and to the house, using fire-resistant materials for decking and roofing, and designing unvented attic and crawl spaces to prevent embers from being sucked into the home and burning it from the inside out. There are also active systems, such as fire-retardant sprinklers, that can keep a home from igniting in the first place. A mix of passive and active approaches can be integrated into a home either as a retrofit or at the time of its initial design and construction. Architects like myself advocate for these measures, as do local contractors like Allen Construction, who have compiled them into a free guidebook available on their website. Most clients do opt for at least some degree of fire-resiliency in the design of their houses. After all, a home is a terrible thing to lose.
But after these recent fires in Los Angeles, I’ve found myself thinking about fire-resilient design as something much more important than a way to protect my clients’ own homes. The scale of destruction and the breadth of these fires’ spread shows us what fire-resistant design truly is: a civic duty. It is as much about protecting our neighbor’s houses and those of the people miles down the road as our own. After all, fires spread from structure to structure. The fewer that are burning, the easier it is for the fire to be contained, the safer everyone is, and the less damage is wrought. No fuel, no fire.
Disasters compel us to rethink our world and our place in it. The 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara galvanized the then-nascent environmental movement and made Santa Barbara its epicenter. The spill laid bare that the individual decisions we make and the network of systems those decisions collectively create have a profound impact on the other people in our communities and on the earth we all share. It revealed how deeply intertwined we are with each other and our planet. It also opened new ways of thinking about community and our interdependence on one another to curb environmental disasters. No single person has the power to lessen climate change by deciding to reduce their carbon footprint, but if enough of us choose to, we could reduce the trend together.
The L.A. fires revealed something similar: They made visible the typically invisible interconnections between our buildings. According to the Orange County Fire Authority, embers can travel up to five miles downwind. That means that if my house is on fire, it can set another one ablaze that — even on flat ground without obstruction — would be too far away for me to even see. Our individual houses form a vast network across which fire can wreak its havoc. It is our responsibility to do everything we can to take our houses out of that network. No single person’s choice to fireproof their home is going to prevent the next wildfire from spreading, but if we collectively choose to, we can turn our neighborhoods into resilient webs that prevent the spread of fire among themselves and farther down the road.
The wisdom of that approach is clear, and not just to me. Several communities in Santa Barbara — including Las Canoas Lane, Coronada Circle, Cima Linda Lane, Sycamore Canyon, the Santa Barbara Highlands, Northridge Road, and Arriba Way — have become “Firewise Communities.” That means they participate in a free, voluntary program run by the National Fire Protection Association that helps communities get organized, identify wildfire risks, and work together to make their neighborhoods safer. People are already banding together to help prevent the next disaster, and we should all follow their example.
But there is another, deeper question I hope the fires spur us to think about more seriously: What does it mean to build ethically in a world whose climate is changing? How can architecture answer the existential questions being asked of us?
Before we can approach that, we need to keep in mind that much of what we call “natural” disasters are not wholly natural. Extreme weather events are getting more severe and more frequent. The medium of these disasters — fire, wind, water — may be natural, but their magnitude is not. Rather, their magnitude is a direct result of the human activities causing climate change.
One of those activities is building. The architecture and construction industry is responsible for nearly half of global carbon emissions annually. About 50 percent of those emissions are from embodied carbon, or the amount of carbon associated with manufacturing, transport, and installation of the building materials themselves. The more we build using typical materials and construction methods, the more carbon we emit into the atmosphere, the warmer the world will get, and the worse our droughts and fires will become.
The most sustainable building is the one that’s already built. According to the EPA, it takes 65 years for a highly sustainable new building to recover the carbon cost of demolishing the original structure it replaces. To build ethically today, we must build to last. That means building to withstand fire, but also building to endure such that another new building need not soon replace the one we build today.
Again, this should be nothing new for architects. The Roman architect Vitruvius, writing in the first century BCE, considered firmitas — or durability — one of the three fundamental principles of a well-designed building. A good building stands the tests of time. For Vitruvius, this was both an aesthetic and a philosophical truth. Not much is new under the sun, but this much is: Today, we no longer have the luxury of thinking about building durably in merely aesthetic or philosophical terms. Climate change demands that we think of it as an ethical imperative.
Tim Gorter, AIA, NCARB is a licensed, Passive House–certified architect with more than 25 years of designing and delivering residential, commercial, and institutional projects. He founded Tim Gorter Architects in 2010.
