Archinect - News

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa architecture students use AI and 3D modeling to preserve Lahaina heritage structures lost in August wildfires

2024-03-29T12:51:00-04:00

A new course being taught to undergraduate students this semester at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Architecture is helping preservationists on Maui document lost heritage structures using the same AI-augmented 3D modeling technology that was previously incorporated into the rebuilding of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Co-taught by Dean William Chapman, Associate Professor Hyoung-June Park, and visiting Assistant Professor Kyung Hoon Hyun of South Korea’s Hanyang University, ARCH 490: Rebuilding Lahaina in Mixed Reality offers students the chance to aid in the recovery efforts by creating digital versions of lost buildings such as the Baldwin House, Wo Hing Society Hall, and Old Lahaina Courthouse.

"We want students to expand their creativity to think of more than simply rebuilding what was destroyed, but also what they can do with this new 3D model that they created," Hyun explained to Hawaii Public Radio recently. "They can add values or communal experiences within ...

America's first 3D printed fire-resistant ADU concept is under construction in Southern California

2024-02-29T11:57:00-05:00

A new 3D printed ADU prototype made of concrete and other fire-resistant materials is under construction as part of a demonstration taking place this month in Walnut, California.

The first-of-its-kind project was born of a collaboration between the fire departments of both Walnut and Los Angeles. A local couple volunteered to give the host the design for general contractor Builtech Construction Group in the interests of applying lessons valuable for disaster prevention at a time when an influx of peri-urbanization has left the state more susceptible to fire-damaged structures than ever before.

Image courtesy RIC Technology

The unit is both non-combustible and fire-resistant and is being constructed using contractor RIC Technology’s robotic 3D printer.

Construction takes only 20 days from the start of the printing process to finish after the foundation has been laid. It yields a total of 1,200 square feet of space with 2 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. The design works by eliminating any...

Designing for disaster in an increasingly fire-burdened California

2023-04-19T11:45:00-04:00

Each home was considered to be built to shelter-in-place standards, with ignition-resistant construction and materials—a cutting-edge approach for the time, though the standards have since been adopted into state and local codes. They are little fortresses of tile roofs, stucco walls, hardscape patios, and covered eaves. [The] heavy fortification gives the communities—both the structures and the people who shelter in them—an extra chance to survive.

The state is in a bind caused by its dire need to quickly enact affordable housing and the movement of populations into liminal wildland-urban interface zones, both of which are placing more people in the fight or flight predicament that’s leading to more innovations in residential design surrounding the concept of defensible space.

Experts point to homes in the Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood in San Diego as exemplars of fire safety that the rest of the state is still lagging to catch on to, hemmed in by costs that are making defensive evacuation plans harder to execute. “Shelter-in-place really was a theory,” local fire protection specialist Brandon Closs told the MIT Technology Review, “it’s still a work in progress.”

Amidst increasing wildfires, should we retreat or regroup? A UC Davis proposal recommends taking the high road despite challenges

2022-07-19T16:13:00-04:00

As Spain, France, Greece, and Germany grapple with a spate of historic wildfires that have gripped the region in recent weeks, a group of researchers in the American West is now advocating for fairly extreme shifts in development trends there which would buck others currently favored by the industry that involve more direct applications of design in the built environment.

Writing in FastCompany this week, UC Davis professors Emily Schlickman, Brett Milligan, and Stephen M. Wheeler proposed a three-point plan that entails zoning changes (including San Diego’s approach of avoiding hillside development) and placing severe limitations on new construction, which are seen as a large part of the problem in Northern California and other places.

The trio pointed to recent examples from Los Angeles County and an existing law in Oregon as frameworks that could easily be adopted in the sunshine state, backed up by aggressive legal measures and incentivizations that would further prevent develo...

A new tool provides wildfire risk data to American homeowners in the face of climate change

2022-05-18T20:15:00-04:00

Wildfires are becoming an increasing threat to American homeowners with the acceleration of climate change, and now a new tool from the nonprofit First Street Foundation will allow them to access probability-based data about the potential risk their property may face over the next 30 years.

By incorporating open-source tax information, satellite imaging, and advanced computer modeling, the Foundation was able to produce a Fire Factor metric and interactive map that details both the intensity of future burns and their ability to move across varying topographies. An individual structure’s score is thus determined by its available defensible space, roof and construction type, and proximity to fuels like trees, shrubs, and wild grasses.

Currently, there is no publicly available data on fire risk similar to the flood damage assessments required by the federal National Flood Insurance Prog...

2020 USC Architectural Guild Charrette first place winners design a movable building surrounded by landscape that fights wildfires

2020-07-21T14:33:00-04:00

The USC Architectural Guild Charrette is an annual design competition held by the school that invites fourth-year, fifth-year, and graduate students to compete in a one-day charrette geared around a specific design prompt. This year, the prompt challenged students to design a fire-resilient visitor center in the Angeles National Forest. Landscaping was an important part of this project as they were judged based on how well they embraced fire resilient principles.

The first place entry came from students Andrew Blumm, Alison Iwashita, and William Makoto Izu, who worked together to create a contemporary iteration of the traditional fire lookout tower. Working on a hillside site, their building sits on a rail system that allows it to retract into the hillside and remain protected in the event of a forest fire.

The landscaping ethos of the entry builds on the practice of administering burns to small shrubs and plants before a wildfire hits to clear the forest floor and rejuvenate the s...

As California's wildfires become increasingly urban, concerns over airborne health risks grow 'worrisome'

2019-11-07T15:31:00-05:00

The samples he collects will help scientists better understand how the massive increase in seasonal wildfires burning through residential areas might be affecting our health. Where smoke once contained the remnants of only biomass (trees and other organic matter), fires are now burning up homes—structures that contain thousands of synthetic chemicals, paints, plastics, and metals that smolder and combust into tiny particles.

#GettyFire: Wildfire breaks out in Los Angeles near the Getty Center

2019-10-28T13:57:00-04:00

Early this morning, at around 1:30am, a fire broke out along the 405 freeway near the Getty Center in Los Angeles. As the blaze spread through the Sepulveda Pass, firefighters were found on the scene working to contain the fires as residents were prompted to evacuate the area according to ABC 7 news.

Brush fires are common among the dry landscapes of Southern California, specifically in Los Angeles County. In December 2017 the Getty Center experienced and survived a massive wildfire that erupted along the Sepulveda Pass. The Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier & Partners in 1997 and is designed with a series of fire prevention strategies, including large stone wall expanses and a minimal number of openings located adjacent to the complex's scrubby hillsides.

Although these natural disasters are not uncommon, the severity of these events reaffirm many things.

The intensity and power of these fires can quickly destroy thousands of acres of land and countless homes and structure...

After years of improvement, air pollution in the U.S. is getting worse again

2019-10-24T14:09:00-04:00

Air pollution worsened in the United States in 2017 and 2018, new data shows, a reversal after years of sustained improvement with significant implications for public health. In 2018 alone, eroding air quality was linked to nearly 10,000 additional deaths in the U.S. relative to the 2016 benchmark, the year in which small-particle pollution reached a two-decade low, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Washington Post reports that "concentrations of the pollutant have risen about 5.5 percent since 2016," and points out several contributing factors that the Carnegie Mellon study identified: increased natural gas use and vehicle traffic, risen severity and frequency of wildfires, and the rollback of regulatory enforcement of the Clean Air Act in recent years.

"The health implications of this increase in [annual average fine particulate matter] PM2.5 between 2016 and 2018 are significant," explains the research paper. "The increase was associated with 9,700 additional premature deaths in 2018. At conventional valuations, these deaths represent damages of $89 billion."

Smoke from burning Amazon rainforest drops São Paulo into sudden darkness

2019-08-20T19:29:00-04:00

In the height of daytime, the sky suddenly blackened, and day became night in Sao Paulo. Sure, smog is bad in the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, where traffic jams can stretch for dozens of miles. But not this bad. What was going on? Was the end near?

A combination of meteorological events paired with smoke that had traveled hundreds of miles from intense forest fires in remote parts of the Amazon caused a period of sudden midday darkness in the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere on Monday, reports The Washington Post.

Meanwhile on Twitter, #PrayforAmazonia emerged as a trending hashtag, channeling the global outrage over the lack of media coverage and political action towards the vast forest fires which have been raging in the drought-stricken Amazon rainforest region of Brazil for more than two weeks now.

Fires are burning across central South America. Yesterday #NOAA20's OMPS instrument detected the aerosol index - an index that detects the presence of particles like soot and dust in the atmosphere - in the vicinity of the fires. This can help inform air quality forecasts. https://t.co/lCMwTqWxtA
— Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) (@JPSSProgram) August 19, 2019

Much of the blame for the lack of disaster response i...

California wildfires: shortage of construction workers complicates rebuilding efforts

2018-08-07T15:31:00-04:00

Hundreds of families displaced by Northern California’s fires could face another challenge to rebuilding their homes — a persistent shortage of construction workers. California lost nearly 20 percent of its construction work force between 2005 and 2016 [...]. And more than 40 percent of construction job postings in the state remain unfilled for at least six weeks, according to the study, the third longest wait in the nation.

California's housing crisis will only get exacerbated as several devastating wildfires are ripping through entire regions of the Golden State while construction firms are struggling to hire enough workers to rebuild communities. According to Cal Fire, more than a thousand homes have already been lost in the Carr fire as well as the ongoing Mendocino Complex fire—now the largest in modern state history.

All this new bad new adds to the nearly 9,000 structures that burned down last fall when a series of Wine Country fires ripped through Northern California.

Massive wildfire erupts near the Getty Center in Los Angeles

2017-12-06T12:52:00-05:00

A new wildfire closed part of Interstate 405 early Wednesday near Los Angeles' posh Bel Air area and prompted evacuations [...] The closure of I-405 -- a significant north-south artery in the country's second-largest city -- came after flames swept down the foothills toward the highway near Sepulveda Pass and the Getty Center arts complex as stunned motorists drove by shortly before 6 a.m.

The Richard Meier-designed Getty Center — scheduled to celebrate its 20th anniversary on December 16 — woke up to a terrifying scene before sunrise this morning with the neighboring hillscape ablaze.

The Skirball Fire is the latest of several fast-moving wildfires devastating Southern California this week.

What's left from the Alberta wildfire

2016-05-10T19:31:00-04:00

After a week of wildfires raging through the town of Fort McMurray and the surrounding area, more than 500,000 acres of forest and 2,400 buildings have been destroyed in Alberta, Canada. Rachel Notley, Alberta's premier, said that 90% of Fort McMurray remains intact, though several neighborhoods were complete losses...While the last fires in town are put out, and infrastructure repaired, more than 80,000 residents will have to wait at least another two weeks before they can return.

Trial by fire: man waits out raging wildfires in concrete home

2015-08-27T15:01:00-04:00

“I was a little disappointed in the fire service,” said Belles, standing on the charred hillside next to the dome in his semi-rural neighbourhood on the edge of town.

Wildfires currently blazing in Okanogan County, Washington, have just broken the record for the biggest in the state’s history. With fire season just getting underway and September looking hot and dry, the so-called Okanogan Complex fires will likely persist for months.

In Omak, a small town in the county nearly surrounded by the fire, many residents have already fled, forced out by the blaze or sickly thick smoke. But self-described “inventor” John Belles decided to stick things out in his self-made concrete dome house.

Surrounded by 12-foot high flames and extreme heat, Belles stayed in the house, unharmed (but toasty), until the fire around him had died down, leaving only charred vegetation behind. He told the Guardian, “It was incredibly hot but the house did what it said it would do. They said it was nonflammable, and it was.” The house was undamaged, save for a destroyed electricity box.

Belles built the home himself 15 years ago, knowing full well of the fire danger in the area ...