How Do We Live When We Can't Breathe the Air Outside? : In Case of Fire

Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest are gaining increasing frequency, scale and intensity, as a result of anthropogenic climate change and harmful environmental practices. What were once singular emergency events are now parts of a season that stretches on for over half of the year. Our everyday realities are drastically changing as we grapple with an environmental phenomena of newly vast proportions: wildfire smoke. Smoke travels continental distances transgressing political borders, closing the distance between the so-called urban and wilderness, and emphasizing the collectivity of the atmosphere. For most, the wildfire season is experienced through the smoke, rather than the fire. Our relationship to this potent environmental force, like all others, is mediated by architecture. Smoke exists critically from the scale of the particulate to the scale of the atmosphere, and is characterized by uncontrollable dynamism. This project unfolds through a re-enactment of multiple entangled stories from the 2023 Grouse Complex in British Columbia’s Okanagan region. The event encompassed three simultaneous and connected wildfires - the McDougall Creek, Walroy Lake, and Clarke Creek wildfires. Instead of positioning smoke as an antagonist, this thesis acknowledges it as an inevitable spatial and material reality. It seeks to understand its essential qualities in order to design for it in multiple contexts. The method of re-enactment grounded the project in the everyday experience of wildfire smoke, and allowed the scale to return to that of architecture and its microclimates. Moving backward and forward in time, the stories illustrate how anthropogenic and natural processes shape one another, and imagine how architectural interventions may create alternative futures. These stories are specific to Kelowna and the Okanagan, but they are also emblematic of typical wildfire events and histories of human relationship to the land across North America. The interventions aim to suggest different ways to approach designing for temporal and dynamic environmental forces, such as the atmosphere. It speculates on ways in which we might live through smoke events as a newly normalized condition by embracing multiplicity and foregrounding community resilience.