Virtual Presentation: “Burnt: A tale of three fires”

Monday, January 29
11am-12pm
Click here to join the Zoom meeting

Join us for a presentation by Jacob Saul Heydorn Gorski, Master in Landscape Architecture, Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, about his project that “focuses on the mountain town of Red Feather Lakes in the American state of Colorado to question dominant narratives we have of wildfire and offer a new path forward.”

Burnt: a tale of three fires investigates how embracing wildfire can restore resiliency and create new cultural connections between a landscape and its inhabitants. It draws from the designer’s childhood fascination of landscape and fire and takes inspiration from a Dutch attitude towards another natural threat: water.

Ecosystems like Colorado’s Front Range mountains are disturbance-driven. The Front Range is built to burn. Forests here have adapted to the kinds of fire that burn in them. Native plant and animal species developed strategies that allowed them to resist, be resilient to, or even depend upon fire. The lodgepole pine, for instance, cannot reseed without the heat of heavy fire.

Historically, these fires led to a rich landscape mosaic. In the US, however, a century of fear- driven policy and land-use has removed fire from these forests. The resulting landscape is unhealthy, less resilient, and less diverse than before. When it burns, it burns hotter, longer, and more frequently than it can naturally absorb. The lasting effects and damage of these fires can extend for years.

Despite the critical role of fire in these ecosystems, we continue to try to remove fire from the landscape. Since 2016, Colorado alone has spent more than $2 billion fighting fires. What could it look like if we begin to let fire back into the landscape? In the Netherlands, flooding, long seen as a threat, has increasingly been used as an opportunity to create new experiences and habitats. Can we do the same for fire? To explore this question, the project focuses on the area around Red Feather Lakes, a mountain town in the Front Range. This town is nestled on the border of different forests with different fires. Part of the forest burnt in a 2020 wildfire. The town is highly vulnerable to fire yet highly dependent on the forests for recreation and water. The different pressures of fire come together on this site.

The project takes inspiration from local ecology to develop three new strategies for wildfire: defensive, resilient, and resistant. Each strategy kickstarts a process based on community involvement and site-derived materials to let fire tell a different story about the landscape. In the first site, fire breaks shape the way a forest burns and allow recreants to experience the ‘terrible sublime’ of the postfire landscape. In the second site, a stream is transformed into a naturally-managed defensive buffer that mitigates the effects of post-fire flooding. In the last site, a community comes together to restore a severely burnt forest. Together, these three strategies not only reshape and restore the ecosystem but also use fire as a means to create new landscape experiences and community exchange. While site-specific, the interventions here offer a model for other landscapes in the American West for a possible future with fire.

We have, to quote Dante, found ourselves “within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” This project offers a new path ahead, one lit by the light of fire.

Jacob Saul Heydorn Gorski
2022