Fire has been central to architecture for millennia, but combustion-derived materials including concrete, steel, glass, insulation, adhesives, and plastics have shaped far more of the built environment than the chimney alone. In parallel, the sounds of power plants and combustion engines have inspired whole new schools of musical practice, from Futurism to Blues to Metal. Meanwhile, the increasing proliferation of petrochemical art materials has dissolved their historically uneven quality and availability, empowering such Modernist universalisms as color theory and grid systems. These aesthetic transformations persistently, elusively, quietly—and sometimes more overtly—seep back into professional standards for building safety, efficiency, and comfort, policy discussions about transportation infrastructure and energy resilience, and consumer decisions about what to buy, make, use, repair, modify, replace, or discard.

As fossil economies are increasingly challenged for their role in climate change and biodiversity loss, do their accompanying aesthetic paradigms also need to be rethought? Should sustainability initiatives simply attempt to replicate petroaesthetics in a less harmful way or should new forms of aesthetics (or very old ones) be encouraged to (re-)emerge? To grapple with these questions, we will produce both analyses and imaginings—in text, image, sound, and object—that exemplify, problematize, and counteract combustion aesthetics as a cultural inheritance.