Nicole Theresa King: The Southern California Landscape as Speculative Semitropic

The devastating Los Angeles fires of early 2025 once again underscored Southern California’s now year-round wildfire season. Tearing increasingly through densely populated areas, these fires at the wildland-urban interface illustrate the region’s complex relationship with ecology, adaptation, and development. This talk examines the designed landscape of a prominent art museum and research campus in the Los Angeles area, conceived in the late twentieth century as both a cultural landmark and a highly managed environment. The study examines how its garden premises exemplify a »semitropic« design aesthetic within a fire ecology, shifting between artificial show garden and ecologically functional infrastructure. The gardens' design reinforces the ideal of »defensible space«—both as a literal fire mitigation strategy and a symbolic extension of California’s aspirational image. Situating this semi-public museum estate within Los Angeles’s broader history of wildfires, this lecture considers how these designed landscapes do more than adapt to fire risk; as a medium, they shape and potentially obscure planetary ecological crises.