Hannah Ismail

Year 2 MArch

F.I.R.E Civic Hub

Framework Integrated Resilience Exchange
West of Inverness, Scotland

F.I.R.E Civic Hub is a fire station and community campus set on the moorland west of Inverness, created to meet Scotland’s rising wildfire threat. The building aligns its form and programme with the behaviour of flame, smoke and ember. At the landscape scale, graded clearings, firebreak planting and burn pits act as proving grounds where predictive spread models confront real wildfire scenarios. Inside, a year-round cycle explores ignition, flame, ember and smoke: workshops teach residents to build defensible lines and read forecast indices while relaying to stationed forestry crews to landscape needs and care. The proposal operates as a proving ground, bringing together new material configurations, challenging spatial relationships and investigating the threat and design potential of fire at both the landscape and architecture scales.

During an active fire, the principal lab converts into a sheltered refuge cooled and shielded by evaporative mist and sacrificial façade layers. The fire-hardened internal shells store equipment and double as classrooms for prescribed-burn training in calmer seasons. By knitting everyday civic life with emergency response and environmental care, the proposal presents a transformative approach to addressing one of Scotland’s most pressing and threatening environmental challenges.