norwichuni_architecture
Featured Project:
Negentropic Fire: Rituals of Memory and Renewal
by Joe Slack @joe._slack
(BA Architecture Year 3)
Recipient of RIBA East Student Award 2025 for Norwich University of the Arts; Purcell Research Report Award
This project explores fire as both a destructive and regenerative force, drawing from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and the idea that “combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create.” Set in Dunwich, Suffolk – a coastline shaped by erosion, deforestation, and human intervention, it investigates fire’s evolving role in landscape transformation. Beginning with Dunwich’s environmental history, the project develops through film, material studies, and speculative design, revealing cycles of memory, loss, and renewal. At its heart is a proposed intervention rooted in the Anglo-Saxon ‘need-fire’ ritual: a communal fire marking the end of a seasonal timber harvest. Through pyrolysis, it produces charcoal and biochar, resources that feed back into the land and local making practices, reframing fire as a stabilising, negentropic agent. The architecture comprises a series of fire-formed spaces that embody material change. Users encounter the physical and symbolic presence of combustion – scorched surfaces, transformed matter, seasonal rituals, grounding human activity in ecological processes. Informed by Galiano’s Fire and Memory, the project challenges dominant associations of fire with entropy, proposing it instead as a cyclical, purposeful tool for ecological and cultural renewal. Here, burning becomes ceremony; waste becomes matter for growth. The land is not consumed but composed anew, through rituals of memory, heat, and renewal.
Tutors: Dr George Themistokleous, Sarah de Villiers (Design Studio), Romanos Tsomos, William Burgess, Dr George Themistokleous, William Hailiang Chen (Technology and Environment), February Philips, Tony Cleford (Professional Studies).
Course Convenor: Claudia Morgado
Programme Director: Prof Teresa Stoppani
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