Bōsai Architecture for Fire-Prone Los Angeles

Abstract

As climate change intensifies and human development pushes further into fire-prone terrain, wildfire disasters have ceased to be phenomena confined to distant forests. The threat is now increasingly urban, with convergent architectural, infrastructural, and social dimensions. The January 2025 Los Angeles fires—ignited under extraordinary weather conditions that overwhelmed even the ostensibly fire-wise communities of the American West—exposed the fragility of municipal water systems and revealed the limits of fire-safety strategies focused on parcel-by-parcel hardening. This thesis takes that failure as an occasion to reexamine wildfire resilience in Southern California's increasingly volatile climate as a question of civic identity and collective responsibility. The prevailing assumption that fire risk can be mitigated solely through more robust material assemblies has perpetuated a detachment from place. This obscures the extent to which resilience is, at its core, site-specific, and produces buildings that are hermetically sealed off from their environment rather than attuned to it. Drawing on Japan’s bōsai culture—the locally embedded ritualizing of disaster preparedness in everyday community life—this thesis proposes a new civic complex on the site of the former Palisades Recreation Center. The complex brings water collection and storage into view and pairs them with spaces for education, mutual aid, and recreation that adapt across seasons and emergencies—all beneath a sweeping watershed canopy. Where current rebuilding efforts default to the individual structure, this project argues for the neighborhood. Resilience is less a material specification than a form of coexistence—with a combustible ecology, and with one another.