In Los Angeles, entire neighborhoods such as Altadena and Pacific Palisades have been wiped away by recent firestorms. Walking through these areas today is unsettling.Cleared plots. No houses. No roofs. Just the outline of streets where life used to happen.
The question is no longer if we rebuild — but how.At SCI-Arc, the Resilient Futures Task Force was formed to respond exactly to this moment. Not with abstract visions, but with knowledge, education, and real, buildable answers.As part of this initiative, Marcel Bilow — known to many students as Dr. Bucky Lab — was invited to Los Angeles by Sophie Penetier, a member of the task force team. Together with SCI-Arc students, he worked hands-on to build 1:1 mock-ups and prototypes using reclaimed timber, focused on one clear goal:showing how timber homes can be rebuilt in a more fire-hardened way — without abandoning wood as a material.Notably, the students involved volunteered their time in the SCI-Arc woodworking workshop, fabricating the prototypes from reclaimed wood. This spirit of collective effort — learning by making, giving skills where they matter — became a central part of the project.Because in Southern California, timber is the standard.It is cost-efficient. Structurally resilient in earthquakes. And when reclaimed, it can reduce embodied carbon dramatically — down to a fraction of virgin timber — while retaining both stored carbon and material history.The recent fires have triggered skepticism toward wood construction. Understandably so. But fire resilience is rarely about the material alone. It is about details.Many timber houses fail not because wood burns, but because embers travel. Wind-driven embers enter open cavities, roof edges, façade gaps — settling where they cannot be seen, allowing fire to grow from the inside out.
This is where the prototypes become powerful teaching tools.
Students explored small but decisive interventions:
- Closing cavities with fine metal meshes to block embers
- Reducing hidden voids where fire can propagate
- Rethinking façade and roof detailing with fire behavior in mind
Simple moves. High impact.
The workshop prototypes make these strategies visible and understandable — not only for architects and engineers, but for homeowners who are about to rebuild their lives.
Timber is not the enemy.
Ignorance of fire behavior is.
What these emptied plots in the Palisades and Altadena show us is brutal clarity. And what the work at SCI-Arc shows is equally clear:
resilience is built through knowledge, craft, and detail — one prototype at a time.
Have a look at the images from the workshop.
If you want to know more about the discussions and topics, follow a recording of the opening of the exhibition and a meeting of the group.
facadeworld 