Q&A with Mohamed Sharif, AIA, RIBA

I. Leading on Wildfire Resilience and Recovery

As Co-Chair of the AIA|LA Wildfire Disaster Response Task Force, what were the most critical lessons learned from recent wildfire events that architects and urban planners must internalize for future development in fire-prone regions?

The January 2025 wildfires left us with two essential lessons. First: chronically underutilized 5‑foot side yards are dangerous, acting like kindling as radiant heat leaps from house to house in a chain reaction. Second: moist soil and healthy, hydrated vegetation are not hazards—they’re among the best defenses a home can have.

These insights call for a fundamental shift in how we rebuild. In Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZs), we must adapt long‑proven Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) strategies for urban settings—expanding side and rear setbacks and creating defensible landscapes even in denser neighborhoods.

Crucially, these measures should come before home‑hardening techniques; otherwise, we’re still protecting homes that sit too close together to begin with. And with climate‑driven weather extremes intensifying, we should consider extending these principles citywide—especially as aging single‑family homes are replaced in neighborhoods already lacking tree canopy and healthy soil.

The “Supporting a Resilient and Sustainable Rebuild: Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire-Safe Recovery” report is a crucial document. Please elaborate on one or two key recommendations from the report that have the most significant potential to reshape building practices and policy in Southern California. And how does the Task Force envision architects contributing to long-term community resilience and prevention strategies in areas susceptible to wildfires? What role do you see for design in fostering a culture of preparedness?

The Blue Ribbon Commission’s call for a permanently funded Fire Control District (FCD) to lead “regional fire mitigation activities, including buffer zones and retrofitting” signals just how urgent it is to adopt proactive, holistic strategies for resilient development in our climate‑stressed, hazard‑prone region. For the District to succeed—and for architects to contribute in a meaningful way—organizations like the AIA, ASLA, and APA need to secure a seat at the table from the outset.

A well‑structured FCD could do more than coordinate mitigation efforts; it could become a hub for interdisciplinary preparedness, a driver of research and innovation, and a source of state‑of‑the‑art continuing education for professionals and the public. We’ve already seen what this can look like. In early 2025, when AIA California asked our task force to develop fire-safe construction modules, co-chair Greg Kochanowski—a rare dual architect-landscape architect—brought together experts from multiple fields to create widely referenced, highly relevant guidance that’s undoubtedly shaping best practices statewide.

II. Academic Insights: Bridging Theory and Practice

Your work at UCLA, particularly “Farther Apart and Closer Together,” seems highly relevant to our current urban challenges. Could you explain the core concepts of this research and how it informs your thinking on architectural solutions for diverse communities and increasingly distributed living patterns? As Director of the Undergraduate Program in Architectural Studies and Graduate Program Design Faculty at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, how are you preparing the next generation of architects to address complex environmental and social challenges like wildfire resilience and equitable urban development?

“Farther Apart and Closer Together” was a graduate-level class I taught at UCLA in spring 2025. Its goal was to formulate what my senior colleague and special advisor to the class, Professor Dana Cuff, calls a Demonstration Project. In this case, the project is a fire‑safe reimagination of a hypothetical Los Angeles R1 block—twenty 50’ × 100’ lots (ten facing a southern street, ten facing a northern one, with no alley between)—informed by lessons from recent wildfires. Beyond the studio, the outcomes will be disseminated as a visual addendum to the UCLA contribution to the Blue Ribbon Commission findings, of which we were a part, and shared with a broader public audience. Input from Professor Cuff (Public Architecture and Urbanism) and Professor Stephanie Landregan (Landscape Architecture) was integral to both research and design, and it fostered a culture of proto-expert, engaged citizenship for the students. This last point is crucial to my pedagogical approach at both graduate and undergraduate levels in a public research university setting, where I focus students on aspirational and inspirational ideas that have a strong chance of making a tangibly significant impact through rigorous scholarship and expertise.

Drawing on Gregory Ain’s Mar Vista tract while adapting to current Los Angeles R1 density standards—including single‑family homes with attached ADUs and JADUs—students applied Wildland Urban Interface Zone 1 parameters, increasing side‑yard spacing to reduce fire risk between structures. This shift in spacing, combined with maintaining realistic density, pushed narrow building frontages toward the street, yielding a porous perimeter‑block condition with lawns relocated inward.

The resulting plan reconceives the spaces between and behind buildings as shared civic realms: communal driveways, shaded courts, and interior streets linking adjacent living rooms, and an east‑west planted paseo spanning the rear of the block. Property lines dissolve into a gradient of green space: fire‑ and wind‑defensive trees, mid‑lot lawns, and bioswales that form a stormwater and greywater loop feeding street trees beyond the site. The balance of slender buildings and generous open space proposes a micro‑urbanism that is safer through separation yet more sociable: front doors, living rooms, dining rooms, and kitchens face each other, drawing neighbors together around shaded outdoor rooms and shared landscapes.

III. Ecologically Sound Practices and Contaminated Soils

The AIA|LA “Healthy Grounds” panel discussion on remediating and restoring contaminated soils will highlight crucial ecological strategies. What are some of the most surprising or impactful findings, and how can these insights be practically applied in urban development projects in Los Angeles? Given the history of industrial land use in various parts of Los Angeles, what specific architectural or landscape design approaches can best integrate remediation efforts with new community development, ensuring safe and healthy environments for residents?

The recent wildfires have left behind more than visible damage—they’ve compromised soil health. Preliminary tests reveal alarming contamination, yet no comprehensive plan or dedicated funding exists for remediation. Our panel examined an alternative to the costly and disruptive “dig‑and‑dump” approach: a plant‑fungi bioremediation method that homeowners could realistically apply themselves, reducing both financial and ecological burdens.

Environmental toxicologist Danielle Stevenson helped structure the event and will rejoin us to share her expertise in rehabilitating industrial land. Her work bridges research and practice—ranging from plastic mycodegradation in landfills to founding the Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation, which advances fungal‑based cleanup and workforce training. She also leads D.I.Y. Fungi, offering education, fungal spawn, and applied research for food, medicine, and remediation, and Healing City Soils, which provides testing and bioremediation support for urban growers.

Panelists Leigh Adams and Valeria Serna Rodarte contributed compelling, community‑based evidence for the scalability of these techniques. Their insights, combined with ongoing collaborations between the Task Force and landscape architects, underscore a simple but vital truth: healthy, hydrated soil is the foundation of healthy, fire‑safe communities—a message we’re committed to amplifying as this work moves forward.

IV. Design Philosophy, Los Angeles’ Future, and the 2028 Olympics & Paralympics

Could you share the core tenets of your design philosophy? How do you balance aesthetics, functionality, and social responsibility in your practice at Sharif, Lynch: Architecture?

Our practice’s approach to how buildings look and feel, how they behave, and how, in turn, they encourage us to behave draws from the experimental legacy of modernism with renewed ideals of collectivity and ecological care, especially in our focus on designing porous, low-rise micro-urbanism. Abstraction, prismatic plasticity, and a frank, elemental sensibility coalesce in empathic architectural figures that recharge their contexts with rhetorical economy—forms at once strange and familiar, tuned to climate patterns to refresh their surroundings and open new ways of seeing and being. Attention to natural light, cross ventilation, passive heating and cooling, and self-shading guide our approach, as does a curiosity for recasting vernacular and urban forms into slender and compact organizations that breathe. We think of form and profiles as technologies in and of themselves: buildings become “climate registers,” to borrow from Alison and Peter Smithson.

This ethos extends beyond our projects. Our roles as public university faculty and our ties to cultural institutions and advisory councils connect us to broader public and professional conversations. Through writing, lecturing, and serving as critics, curators, moderators, planners, and peer reviewers, we work to affirm a core belief: impactful architecture begins with engaged citizenship.

Looking ahead, what is your overarching vision for the future of Los Angeles as a built environment? What are the most pressing design challenges and opportunities you see for our city over the next decade? With the 2028 Olympics & Paralympics on the horizon, how do you believe the architecture and design community can leverage this global event to ensure a more equitable, beautiful, and prosperous region for all Angelenos, beyond the immediate event infrastructure? And in light of the Olympics, what specific types of legacy projects or planning initiatives should Los Angeles prioritize to create lasting positive impacts on housing, public space, and community well-being?

As co‑host of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup and host of the 2028 Summer Olympics, Los Angeles is poised to reaffirm its standing as an inspirational world city—even amid ongoing challenges. These events should be more than fleeting spectacles; they are rare opportunities to retain and repurpose infrastructure into a constellation of civic resources: multifunctional resilience hubs, shade‑rich parks that double as cooling centers, and public spaces that mitigate heat‑island effects while offering respite to vulnerable communities.

For this year’s AIA|LA Academic Summit, which I am co‑convening with Doris Sung, we are inviting leading design educators to discuss how these global events can generate enduring public spaces and amenities that renew the city’s image and reflect its pluralism and welcoming spirit. We intend that the summit’s outcomes will be shaped into advocacy and collaborative strategies with organizing committees and their sustainability partners to realize projects that uplift the city and dignify the lives of its residents.

Mohamed Sharif, AIA, RIBA – Partner, Sharif, Lynch and Architecture & Director, Undergraduate Program in Architectural Studies and Graduate Program Design Faculty, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design

Mohamed is the Principal in Charge of Design and related cultural and technological research. Before founding S, L: A with Todd Lynch, Mohamed designed many award-winning projects across a range of scales, including the 11,000 SF ESRI Campus Pavilion in Redlands, CA, the competition for the 800,000 SF McCormick Place Adaptive Re-use in Chicago, IL, and the 2000 SF Jellyfish Exhibition at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, CA. Mohamed is also an Associate Adjunct Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, teaching in both undergraduate and graduate programs.
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A frequent writer, Mohamed’s essays and reviews have appeared in various publications, including 306090, arq, Constructs, JAE, and Log. His most recent essay is an introduction to SO-IL’s work in the Japanese journal a+u. He served on the editorial board of arq: Architectural Research Quarterly (Cambridge University Press) from 2006 to 2016. He was a longtime advisory board member of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, previously leading it as President from 2007 to 2009.

Mohamed earned a Bachelor of Science (Honors) in Architecture and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Studies from the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen, Scotland. He spent his third year of undergraduate study at the Illinois Institute of Technology as an exchange student. His master’s design thesis earned the James B. Johnston Thesis Prize, and his undergraduate dissertation “On Venturi and Scott Brown” garnered a RIBA Butterworth-Heinemann prize. In 1993, the RIBA retained the dissertation in its permanent collection.

*Disclaimer: The advice and perspectives shared here belong to the author and should not be considered official recommendations from AIA Los Angeles.