Ashes to Assembly
Buildfest 2025
Collaboration with Kutan Ayata, Amber Grovet, Cameron Kursel, Hunter Blackwell, Nathan Logan, and Brandt Rentel
Between January 7 and 31, 2025, Los Angeles was once again on fire. The scale of devastation marked a new chapter in the city’s climate reality. In the aftermath, a quiet but powerful image surfaced: a field of solitary hearths standing amid the rubble. Once sources of warmth and gathering, these structures now read as monuments to resilience, remnants of a shared domestic past.
This proposal took that image not as an end, but as a beginning. Ashes to Assembly reimagined the hearth as a freely scalable and reconfigurable assemblage of timber monoliths and draws from vernacular hearth traditions across cultures: the nested seating of the German kachelofen, the radial openness of the Japanese irori, the resting surface of the Russian pechka, and the ceremonial fire practices of the Lenape peoples, likely once present on this very land.