Fruitvale Fire Garden

Emotionally Sensitive Landscape Design as a Didactic Tool in Native Sustainability Techniques.

Completed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, this project was the result of a summer semester graduate-level studio course in landscape architecture. The design problem at hand consisted of addressing the colonial history of the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park in the Fruitvale neighbourhood of Oakland, California, while intervening with a compelling landscape design to make salient the rich character of California's native plant and wildlife populations. My design process began with a site analysis focused on memory, narratives, and stories, building up to a focus on the pivotal role of fire in the California landscape and among its Indigenous Ohlone people.

Fire is central to human existence; we light fires to cook, to gather, to see, and to create. Today, we often view fire as an existential threat to our built and unbuilt landscapes — however, fire shouldn't be considered in such black-and-white terms. By lighting controlled fires to raze grasslands every autumn for millenia, the Indigenous people living along the Californian coast relied on fire to renew the ecological health of their lands. In this region, fire is a necessary part of a healthy ecosystem's diet. Traditional Ohlone basket-weaving traditions depend on periodic small-scale wildfires to get rid of old, dry bush and to allow certain fire-loving plant species to germinate. These grasses, which sprout from the ashes of fire-torn meadows, are supple and pliable, ideal for weaving. Like a woven fabric, the spaces we inhabit site the convergence of individual and collective stories; in them, we can read both component parts and reuslting wholes.

This design scheme proposes a series of spaces arranged along a gradient of solitude and kinship, sensitive to the competing desires to a) be freed from tradition and b) promote remembrance of cultures made scarce. These spaces are all defined in relation to fire. Fire is simultaneously preserved, shared, demonstrated, studied, and avoided.