ember

Studio Pierandrea Angius

Tutor Ashwin Shah, Angel Tenorio, Anna Kondrashova

Team Gal Gnapp, Sandip Kale, Yuxuan Hu

The Ember Project explores new architectural strategies for resilience at the Wildland–Urban Interface (WUI), where urban expansion meets the increasing threat of wildfire. Responding to climate volatility, resource scarcity, and the fragility of peri-urban landscapes, the project tries to answer: How can we expand the urban environment into more nature-related areas and still be protected from the new threats that come with being closer to it? To do that, the project proposes a community of mobile, transformable, and self-sustaining units that function simultaneously as shelters, protective barriers, and regenerative infrastructures. These autonomous structures harvest water and CO₂ to sustain inhabitants while mitigating fire spread through adaptive microclimate interventions. By combining principles of minimal space design, mobility, and ecological intelligence, Ember envisions a living system that protects vulnerable communities, regenerates burned landscapes and redefines habitation as an active agent in climate adaptation. Positioned at the edge of Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades, the project reflects both an architectural and socio-political response: creating an experimental community that transforms wildfire-prone territories into models of regenerative, collective living in a changing climate.