Fire in Zamora, August 12
The torrid temperatures of August came with flames and ashes: devastating wildfires that also inflamed impotent spirits and the intimate desolation of losing two friends essential to our history. These material flames and those emotional ashes are mixed together in the ominous memory of a summer that equally scorched the landscapes of the Iberian Peninsula and burned out the lives of two architects closely linked to this magazine. François Chaslin, who wrote here regularly since 1989, died on 7 August on a Breton beach; and Javier Alau, who laid out the early issues of AV and designed the covers from 1985 to 2000, passed away three days later in a Madrid hospital. To both we pay tribute in previous pages, complementing our obituary of the brilliant French critic with the last essay he wrote for us, in which he recounts episodes of a shared journey, and enriching our farewell to the exquisite Spanish aesthete with an annotated selection of some of his ninety magazine covers. Mourning for their passing was inextricably tangled up with the country’s August fires, an inferno of blazes that left all of us with an aftertaste of ash.
On 4 August I received an invitation from Professor Liam Ross to participate in his postgraduate course ‘Thinking with Fire’ at the University of Edinburgh. The architect had for his program put together a very concise bibliography, which includes the Gaston Bachelard classic of 1938, La Psychanalyse du feu, my own 1991 book Fire and Memory,’ and Vestal Fire, a 2000 publication of Stephen Pyne, who coined the term ‘Pyrocene’ as an alternative to the more common ‘Anthropocene’ to describe our geological epoch. That same day fire broke out on a mountain close to Tarifa, four days later flames at the Great Mosque of Córdoba – a small catastrophe whose prompt detection prevented a tragedy – took up the front pages of newspapers, and a week afterwards I was fleeing with my family from fire in the Sierra de la Plata, trapped in a horrible jam of vehicles escaping from flames, smoke, and ash.
We were lucky to find room in a hotel just an hour’s drive away, and thus were able to return home on the night of the following day, with the burning mostly already under control. The fire had charred part of the hedge around the garden, but the full-grown pines, palms, figs, and araucarias as well as the house itself were intact, albeit coated with ash. And ashes would dominate the few days of vacation that remained for us there, as the wind blew them into swimming pools, terraces, and also interiors. These were minimal discomforts, paling beside the drama that the media covered for several more weeks, with some fifty conflagrations destroying mountains and villages, amid despair at the lack of preventive measures in winter and the insufficiency of firefighting resources during this summer of flames. So yes, it may indeed be increasingly necessary to ‘think with fire,’ as much for fire brigades and forestry engineers as for urban planners and architects; and yes, ‘Pyrocene’ may indeed be a better term for these burning times and the trail of ashes left in our spirits by the fires of August.
