Looking, After the Fire - Tower of Resilience
Looking, After the Fire - Tower of Resilience
This project studies representations of ‘landscapes after the fire’ across cultures in film, literature, and artifacts of the built environment in the United States and Japan, with a focus on the devastation and renewal brought about by fire. These depictions reveal a precarious balance between nihilism and optimism about the future – horror juxtaposed with beauty; mundane objects gaining spiritual significance in the scorched landscape. Regeneration in this climate will produce new natives, recalibrating species, ecosystems, and cultures. Can cultural and ecological identity be transplanted after the fires, and if so, what remains? In these moments of heightened urgency, can representations of possible futures suggest a path for future reimagination, resilience, and inhabitation? What can cultural relationships to fire in the United States and Japan teach us about our connections to our increasingly vulnerable climate and how to navigate the changing conditions of our environment?
“Looking, After the Fire” is comprised of large-format, evocative, hybrid architectural drawings, renderings, and models that propose a new type of fire lookout tower – towers that would be placed in the landscape after a wildfire, serving as a memorial to that which was lost, and a vantage point from which to watch the spectacular processes of regeneration of our ecosystems. It is only by making it possible to imagine living after fire, that it becomes possible to live with fire.
– PROJECT WEBSITE
– Exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai.
Artists
Spiegel & Megumi Aihara
Spiegel Aihara Workshop is a transdisciplinary design firm, operating at the nexus of architecture, landscape, and urban design. Megumi and Dan believe in the transformative power of good design, in the inextricable relationship between building and context, and in the vital role the built environment plays in the development of community. They view design as a collaborative, research-based process, and work closely with clients to better understand their needs and advance their goals. Current recipients of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
Megumi Aihara, SAW founder, and Landscape Architect, has played a significant role in the design and construction of landscapes of all scales across the United States and beyond. Her work at SAW and her teaching focuses on blurring distinctions between landscape and architecture. She holds an MLA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is a licensed Landscape Architect in California and Hawaii.
SAW founder Dan Spiegel is an architect and educator, leading the SAW’s architectural practice while leading advanced graduate architecture studios at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Dan’s work spans scales and timelines, intertwining the conceptual with practical, using a background in Public Policy to engage design as tool for community engagement and development. Dan was the recipient of the League Prize from the Architectural League of New York in 2018. He holds an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is a licensed Architect in California and Hawaii.
Collaborator
Tamotsu Teshima
Tamotsu Teshima is an acclaimed architect and educator based in Tokyo, Japan, where his office Tamotsu Teshima Architect & Associates produces rational, beautiful architecture that is sensitive to the landscape and responsive to historical context. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Tokyo University of Science.
