Building Insurance

Abstract

Over the past 350 years, the building insurance industry has been shaped by a series of major urban fires, each incrementally standardizing risk assessment and property valuation as financial products of risk management. In recent years, however, climate change has introduced unprecedented weather events that challenge the fine tuned models of insurance; in particular, the rise of wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest have led to local withdrawal of insurance altogether. Within these contexts, the spatial conditions inherited by a highly insured past continually sustain separation, individual prosperity, and standard assemblies as inheritances of expansionist agendas. At this juncture of system failure, this thesis asks: how can architecture rethink more cooperative forms of building and living together that localize risk sharing, responsibility, and stewardship? While wildfire defense strategies put forth by insurance companies and building code armor stick-frame American single family home and its aesthetic traditions, this thesis proposes a new building typology entirely: a neighborly cooperative of adjoined homes. Under a single roof, property lines are transformed into sites of mutual stewardship, manifesting insurance no longer as an abstract response to risk, but as a series of social and spatial relationships between neighbors.