The 2025 PIVOT Fellowship

With Oregon facing a housing crisis and natural disasters destroying available housing stock, defensive architecture can make a difference in alleviating these crises. Elizabeth Folpe, the 2025 PIVOT Fellow, explored the successful material and social characteristics of fire-resilient buildings and communities. She also developed concepts of modular mass timber structures that could potentially be used in disaster relief.

Liz’s research project studied fire-resistant architecture and disaster relief. She considered mass timber’s potential role in establishing resilient, humane, and sustainable homes. Given mass timber’s benefits of carbon sequestration, fire, and seismic-resistant qualities, Liz explored the possibility for modular homes designed with this technology to enable rapid construction of high-quality shelters capable of serving Oregon communities recovering from the growing threat of wildfires.

Liz believes that by designing structures with natural materials like mass timber and relying less on plastics and other materials that release toxins when they combust, recovery efforts can be streamlined and communities will experience fewer health complications from wildfire. For rural communities, mass timber also holds the powerful potential to permanently improve quality of life by providing jobs in forestry and manufacturing.

A component of her project also included mapping areas along the region’s wildlife-urban interface to explore what increasing wildland fire risk will mean for the buildings of the future. Her project was a continuation of work in a University of Oregon studio concerning the resilience of new developments to Oregon’s future risk of wildland fire.

To see Liz’s project, click here.

The PIVOT Fellowship is a means of fostering original thought about issues outside the daily routine or obvious future trajectory of our firm’s thought process. PIVOT selects fellows based on the nature of their project proposal and other factors. It is a paid position and the term runs from June until September.

The PIVOT Fellowship is open to BARCH, BIARCH, MARCH, and MIARCH students for the summer preceding their final year of study at the University of Oregon. Students are selected following an application process that includes review of the candidates’ proposals for a project of their choice to be executed over the summer of the fellowship.

For more information or to apply for the PIVOT Fellowship, click here.