Building the Pyrocene: Fire-centred accounts of the Built Environment

We are entering a fire-age. Increased anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels is creating the conditions for increased wildland fire. To survive in the ‘Pyrocene’, humans need to change their relationship with fire.

What insight does this planetary perspective offer to those working in built-environment disciplines? How might the Pyrocene thesis assist scholars and practitioners imagine new ways of living with fire, responding to existing disciplinary challenges such as life-cycle carbon, landscape and building fire-safety?

This free public symposia, available to attend in-person and online, invites key contributors to introduce the Pyrocene thesis to an architectural audience, and to explore the range of ways that fire shapes the built environment, including the central role fire has played within dwellings across history; principles of landscape, and urban design that work with naturally occurring fire-cycles; the role of combustion as a construction technology; the relationship between fire-safety and life-cycle carbon cost.

13:00: Keynote Presentation with [Arizona State University]

15:00: Panel Presentation & Discussion with [Glasgow University], [University of Edinburgh]

17:00: Keynote presentation with [Universidad Politécnica of Madrid]

This event has been supported by an Edinburgh College of Art Research, Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Grant. Luis Fernández-Galiano’s participation has been supported by the Instituto Cervantes Manchester, and the Cervantes Chair, University of Edinburgh.

This event is part of pair of symposia organised by Liam Ross [University of Edinburgh], Stamatis Zografos and Adam Walls [University College London]. The second event, hosted by the Bartlett School of Architecture, explores how the Pyrocene concept allows us to engage critically with the Anthropocene thesis, contributing to and extending existing queer, feminist, and anti-colonial critiques of that concept.

Further details of both events are available at: [Un]Building the Pyrocene – Two Symposia exploring fire-centred accounts of the built environment

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Host or Publisher Edinburgh College of Art