Mark R. Bavoso

🔾

Woodpile

Pavilion Proposal
With Kira Clingen
Grands-Metis, Quebec, Canada
Competition 2023

The pyrocene, anthropologist Stephen Pyne writes, is the era characterized by humanity’s development of “third-fire,’’or fossil fuels burned in internal combustion. This technology not only releases ancient carbon, intensifying the destruction of “first-fire”(wildfire) but, by internalizing it, removes fire from its public, cultural, and ceremonial valence as humanity’s domesticated “second-fire:’’ the open, wood-fired flame we’ve gathered around for millennia.

Please: gather with us around the fire.

This proposal returns to the cultural roots of fire-making around the hearth in North America and its arboreal carbon cycle. The garden pays homage to the first two eras of fire. The project is planted with fireweed — the first species to colonize sites after wildfire or other disturbances and crab apples — a common source of dense firewood planted close to the home that also provides fodder for humans and animals. The garden is framed by a sculptural, stacked firewood pavilion of northern red oak that is roughly representative of one metric ton of carbon. A central fire-pit is revealed as visitors enter the heart of the space, and introduces a unique programmatic extension for the Jardins des Metis, offering the opportunity for evening and late-season events, cooking, and storytelling around our oldest source of heat and light.