by Amalia Pulgar, M.Arch 2022
Advisors: Thom Faulders & Neal Schwartz
Resilience is the ability of architecture to prevent and recover from damage. This research explores architecture as a system that can live, decay, die, and regenerate; one that embraces environmental precarity as a means toward a new form of resilience.
The hypothesis is that a framework of smaller components working in concert could provide a scaffold for a living architecture that supports infill materials, such as mycelium, whose own state changes as it lives and dies. Given the realities of of climate change, architects need to embrace resilience as something more than protecting our work from destruction; we need to re-imagine our work to allow for it.
The Red Round Barn in the Fountaingrove community in Santa Rosa was burned during the Tubbs Fire in 2017. Rooted in a rich cultural history of cults and cultivation dating back to the 19th century, the Red Round Barn stood out as a symbol of Northern California utopianism.
This project reimagines the Red Round Barn as a placeholder for space, challenging the idea of architectural death after fire destruction.
The research explores architecture as a system that can live, decay, die, and regenerate; a scaffold for a living architecture that supports infill materials, such as mycelium whose own state changes as it lives and dies.