Abstract
As urban habitats and natural landscapes become increasingly intermixed, wildfires that are capable of devastating entire towns and communities have become commonplace in wildland-urban interface areas. This thesis takes a critical relook at wildfire resilience by understanding the wildfire crisis in the Californian context, where the pursuit towards aggressively fortifying urban habitats has become modus operandi. In proposing the alternative premise of wildfire inevitability and reframing the idea of resilience towards one that designs for wildfire-adapted rather than wildfire-resistant communities, this project takes reference to resilient wildfire ecosystems as its architectural design framework. Ultimately, the vision for Rebuilding Paradise brings forward an alternative way of approaching wildfire resilience from an ecological perspective that allows suburban communities and their surrounding ecological systems to coexist synchronously with one another. It is a rebuttal against the typically loss-adverse, hyper-defensive narrative for resilience, proposing instead for an approach of targeted loss and regeneration.