Convergence

After the twin 2017 fires that ravaged the Domes and the countryside that surrounds them, I gave a lot of thought to what it means—practically, historically, and philosophically—to live in a fire ecology. The long silence on this blog is partly due to the mourning period prompted by those fires, as well as the difficulty of formulating an adequate response to them from the point of view of dwelling, as I’ve explored here in the past.

California has always been a fire ecology, which means that its ecosystems evolved with cyclical wildfire incorporated as a key process. Wildfire serves many ecological functions, including culling insect populations that can be injurious to trees, checking the growth of non-native grasses and other plants, and returning nutrients trapped in above-ground structures (such as dead trees) to the soil. Historically, northern CA burned, on average, once every 15 years. Indigenous peoples in the region welcomed and co-existed with this fire ecology. After European colonization, however, fire suppression became the a new tool of capitalist land management. Not just fire departments for towns and cities, but state fire agencies, were formed to protect private and public property from burning, which would reduce its value. This new emphasis on fire suppression was effective at disrupting CA’s fire ecology. Now instead of frequent low-intensity, fast-burning wildfires, CA faces massive, intense ones that are far more damaging. This is what we faced in 2017. Fuels (both natural and human-made) had built up in the environment for over a hundred years, and conditions were ripe for destruction.

After the half-finished Domes lit up like a funeral pyre, and yet survived, I felt that our experiment in radical architecture faced a critical crossroads. Had the design been validated, and all that remained was to complete them as planned? Or did the significant damage they received suggest that if anything, we had been too complacent in our planning, and not given fire its full due?

The response of most landowners in the area to the fires (which burned almost all homes on the mountain to the ground) was to either abandon the area entirely and move to wetter ecosystems, or to rebuild their houses in deliberately altered ecosystems that contained as little fuel as possible. This latter strategy took the form of relocating building sites to open fields, far from trees, while killing and removing trees that felt dangerously close. Such a scorched-earth policy, far more damaging than the fires had been, revealed something deep and sinister in the human project of dwelling, a colonial and all-too-human fixation on the remaking of ecology to suit aesthetics and psychology. While this has been the program for Western civilization for thousands of years at the largest of scales, humans like to believe that these are unwanted and accidental effects of large scale industrialization. This is the logic of anthropogenic climate change: we didn’t know about these long term and global scale effects! And we certainly don’t want things to be this way! But this same logic plays out at very intimate scales, in backyards, when a wildfire and the actual or potential loss of property makes a 200 year old tree next to the house seem threatening.

Personally, I don’t believe that a short-lived human has the right to take the life of a 200 year old organism, especially for reasons of aesthetics or fear. But could the Domes project provide an alternative model or logic? It was designed to shift human perspective to larger and longer scales, to re-conceive of dwelling and building as open ended and future oriented ecological processes. The Domes were for a time 250 years in the future. And yet, here was fire, at the doorstep, today.

There is no easy answer to how to live with fire, to be part of fire ecology and not stand against it. To build anything is to resist entropy, and if it is to house and protect and preserve something for the future, such infrastructure must resist the atomizing forces of the elements: earth, air, water, and fire. How to resist without disrupting, how to dwell with fire without being consumed (figuratively or literally) by it?

The next three years of Dome building, proceeding only in brief periods of the summers and winters, saw a number of adjustments with these questions in mind. In 2018 we repaired as much of the fire damage as we could and instituted a new policy of leaving no wood or plastic-derived material exposed to the larger environment. Vents and drains that had partially melted or burned in the fires were dug down, under ground, and transitioned to metal for their short above-ground stints. Our long-planned copper wall cap and daylight tube cap were completed in copper.

The Domes are underground, even if the “ground” in question is elevated. This means that water, perhaps more prosaically than fire, poses the biggest problem. Water flows downward, and downward in this case is inside. The effect of rain and time on the earth, only recently dug up and moved, also caused significant settling. Earth, when wet, flows like slow motion fluid, which actually leads to cracks forming at the highest points on the domes, and around immovable elements like vents. Like a cosmetic surgeon, Jess ferreted out every crack and marked it with paint.

Our excavators, Jerry and Wyatt, transported more earth to the top of the domes, then dug a number of trenches for our next steps. They then left us for a week to work with the positive and negative space they had created.

One of the most surreal things about the Domes is that the roof is just a hill, with regular grass, plants, and animals living on it. This means that we ended up digging trenches and burying things on our roof, truly scrambling the notions of inside and outside, above and below. In this case, we needed to lay in electrical conduit and the supply and return plumbing for our future solar thermal array. This would cycle water through the interior and roof of the domes, heating it with direct solar energy (no photovoltaics needed) to supply and store heat energy inside. This meant that the pipes needed to be ultra-insulated. We accomplished this by encasing them in thick pipe insulation, then building rigid, waterproof foam boxes around that. At the same time, we built foundation forms for the thermal array.

In order to more effectively transport rainwater off the roof (thus allowing less of it to seep down onto the domes below, and especially the front “pit,” an area in between the two domes, the tunnel passageway that connects them, and the front retaining wall, an area where water tended to collect and seep into the foundation), we had our coppersmith Tony create a large collection pan above the pit. It directed water into a vertical drain that empties down the hill in front of the domes. On the back side, however, we added a French drain in a gravel bed that empties out the back side of the domes. This re-engineering of the roof would move the majority of water away from the pit.

All of this amounted to quite a bit of underground roof infrastructure! We ended up working late into our final night before Jerry and Wyatt were to show up again. We just finished in time, and the next morning the excavators expertly buried everything!

At the end of 2018, then, we had a (mostly) finished roof that both fire and water could easily access, but which could resist their most deleterious effects. The Domes were fully open to and part of their environment (in the most literal and direct way possible), but could modulate the elemental flows that enveloped them.

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This theme of modulated openness and elemental coexistence continued in 2019, which saw an ambitious landscaping and infrastructure plan implemented. We dug a series of shallow trenches around the Domes and laid in a thin network of sprinkler pipes and fire sensors. In the future these will be connected to a water reservoir and microcontroller that will enable the Domes to automatically detect the presence and encroaching direction of wildfire and respond with targeted water to any part of them that may be in danger. I’ll write more about this in the future as the system is implemented.

Our small “kiosk” that houses our utilities and makes them accessible outside of the Domes, which miraculously survived the fires, was expanded and clad in Hardyboard, a cement and fiber board that resists fire and water.

We added a larger foundation pad to the kiosk, a similar pad for the solar PV array (to protect its lowest points, where fire had severely damaged solar panels and microinverters), round footings on the roof for our long-planned solar thermal array, a sidewalk in front of Dome 2, and a patio in front of Dome 1. The patio in particular, the result of weeks of the careful forming of curved boards, mirrors the curve of of the retaining wall above it, as well as the curve of the interior structure.

These elements embody the paradox of concrete: though it requires a fair amount of energy to produce and has the aesthetic reputation of of sterile, urban, anti-ecology, it is the most flexible, moldable, and fluid of all building materials. It is essentially (temporarily) liquid stone, and a little, properly formed, can do the job of much more invasive, brute-force materials. Much of its poor reputation is the result of its dramatic misuse in urban ecology. Ancient Roman architects knew how to use concrete organically; this art seems to have been largely forgotten.

Here, our patio acts as a bulwark against future fire and water, while also harmonizing the interior of the Domes with the larger ecosystem. Instead of modifying the surrounding land, we built an interface that transitions, with minimal incursion, between the space of shelter and the larger energetic system of which it is a part. This interface enables us to take the land and its historic ecology as it comes. This harmonizes with the larger architectural project of the Domes: to enable but softly mediate open exchange between the human and non-human, between interior and exterior, between technology and nature, between built and organic.

In the same way that the patio provides a minimal space of exchange that keeps fire and water out but plants and animals dwelling-with, the Domes are constructed to enable energy to pass in and out in various forms.

Our large south-facing windows are capable of letting enormous amounts of solar energy into the Domes. This is modulated via overhangs on the outside and automatic window shades on the inside. We designed the overhangs using a software tool that helped us calculate, at our exact latitude, how much light they would let it on any given time of any day of the year. All such questions involve weighing a number of factors, but we designed the overhangs (separately for the Dome 1 windows, door, and Dome 2 windows) so that they would maximize the amount of direct sunlight during the winter (when the sun is much lower in the sky) and minimize the amount of direct sunlight during the summer (when the sun is high). The shades inside (which will be the subject of a future post) then modulate what happens to that sunlight, either converting it to heat, allowing it through as visible light, or reflecting it back outside, depending on the season. In this way, the Domes are selectively permeable with the environment with respect to energy cycles, allowing them to be heated or cooled as an ecological process rather than as the marshaling of exogenous energy against the local ecology—standard HVAC systems.

Further energy is transported through the Domes in the medium of water, many hundreds of times more efficient than air. A simple, small pump circulates water from the interior of the domes through the roof and solar thermal array, where tubes concentrate light into heat, transferred to water that returns into the Domes, where it supplies all of the domestic hot water, as well as additional energy for heat in cold weather.

I finished the long-planned solar thermal array in December of 2019. Future posts will cover the creative wiring and plumbing required to enable and sustain these flows.

The Domes, in their relationship with their larger situated ecology, mediate energy, as well as concepts, opening themselves to larger flows but also transforming them in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic forms. This is, I hope, the right way to modulate the potentials of a particular ecosystem, intensifying some energies and diminishing others, while keeping those effects as local and minimal as possible. This is how a dwelling becomes both an integral part of an ecosystem, an extension beyond it, and a self-sustaining pocket within it. Rather than resistance to ecology, a participant and a modulating force. It can then open up new potentials of preservation, of protection, and thereby integration with an environment, through a mediation of energy, matter, and ideas.