Rice Architecture student’s thesis suggests consolidation in California’s suffering wine country
Wildfires are bad enough without houses in the way to help them spread.
Yet that’s the situation in hot, dry climates — most recently in California and Australia — where settlements not only suffer tragedy when fires get out of control but also serve as fuel that helps them spread.
One Rice University architecture student is thinking hard about the problem humans have with fire and how future dwellers at risk could consolidate resources for their own protection while retaining a sense of community.
San Francisco native Vivian Schwab, a Rice Architecture graduate student, put one California community, Santa Rosa, in the context of a massive board game to see if pieces literally could and should be moved away from the blaze-prone foothills.
Santa Rosa lost thousands of structures in the 2017 Tubbs Fire that killed an estimated 22 people.
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