What We’re Watching Burn
As the L.A. wildfires rage on, the destruction of 12,000 structures and counting reveals how individual tragedies add up to profound communal loss.
As the L.A. wildfires rage on, the destruction of 12,000 structures and counting reveals how individual tragedies add up to profound communal loss.
When it first dawned on me that parts of the city I live in were being devoured by flames, the shot of cortisol running through my veins quickly clarified priorities. First, I considered the safety of humans and other living creatures—myself, my kin, but also the strangers I feel bound to by proximity. As I was without power and on the edge of a red flag zone in Los Feliz, I began to think about my home, an accumulation of all my possessions, the stuff that taken together informs my identity, lore, and sense of place in the world. I shuffled around my dark house with a lantern recording a video of all my belongings because an Instagram story I saw said I would need it to fight with the insurance company about what I really owned. (I forgot that, like many others, my renter’s policy was cancelled when I moved to a new place in July; they’d "placed a temporary pause on any new fire insurance.") It dawned on me that the loss of a home is so much bigger than the things themselves; what of the experiences, the life, that happened within the walls? Even if they could be resurrected, they wouldn’t contain things like pencil marks that track your kids’ growth, or the little red wine stain from an out of control New Year’s party you never got around to painting over.
In the case of the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles, which have already killed at least 24 people, ravaged 40,000 acres, and destroyed over 12,300 structures, at least 12,000 people have lost their homes. Many are still living in immeasurable catastrophe; most haven’t even been allowed back to assess the damage, as the fires are only partially contained. You’re lucky if you were one of the 150,000 Los Angelenos who were ordered to evacuate or just stand by with a Go Bag, possibly without power, only to stay home or be able to return the next day. The new normal has become jumping into direct action, donating to GoFundMes, and incessantly refreshing the Watch Duty app to ensure my safety. While sick over the devastation that many friends are experiencing, another kind of grief has emerged—one for the neighborhoods, parks, and historical landmarks that inform the culture of this city.
Much has already been reported about how the fires have taken iconic architecture like Richard Neutra’s Freedman House, the Keeler House by Ray Kappe, the Andrew McNally House, and the Topanga Ranch Motel; the latter was one of the last examples of a bungalow motel in the state. It’s easy to forget that buildings are given historical designation as not just an acknowledgement of their significance to the past, but what their preservation has to offer the future. These were time capsules of our history, the unique and influential way California does architecture—demonstrating the boundary-pushing design that has always been an engine of inspiration for the rest of the country. (It’s no surprise that in October of last year, Los Angeles was the chosen host for Dwell’s Open House Tours.) This destruction is a hard pill to swallow in a relatively young city where historical preservation is difficult and politicized.
The Palisades Fire took the Will Rogers Ranch House in the Santa Monica Mountains, part of a historic state park. It was built in 1945 by the beloved Hollywood actor.
Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Some of these houses were beautiful structures for people to gawk at and maybe tour, but many were meaningful third spaces. The Will Rodgers Ranch House hosted a surf camp for kids, movie nights, and family swing dances. The Pasadena and Pierson Playhouses were both architectural marvels, but more importantly, had been cultivating community theater for the better part of a century. The Pasadena Waldorf School—which was on the National Register of Historic Places for its inventive design by McAnulty + von Sydow Architecture—had been educating children since it was completed in the 1970s. The Theosophical Society in Altadena, dedicated to "uplifting society" and "promoting brotherhood" in a nonpolitical way, featured over 40,000 rare books, documents, and artifacts—and a place to read them—that are now gone.
I could keep going, but in some ways, isolating specific structures fails to truly capture the scale of the damage. Zooming out from the "noteworthy" buildings, we wrestle with the loss of entire neighborhoods. Altadena, which during the Civil Rights Era became a haven for black and brown people who were previously victim to redlining, also has an architectural heritage that can’t be recreated. The community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains was known for its craftsman-style homes built between 1905 and 1930, thatched shingled bungalows with gable roofs and built-in cabinetry that put an emphasis on, well, craftsmanship. The craftsman movement was born in 19th-century England as a response to the mass production and shoddy quality brought on by the Industrial Revolution; aesthetics aside, it’s hard to imagine that anything like them could be rebuilt now, given the cost of building. The neighborhood’s Park Planned development, built in 1946 by Gregory Ain with landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, was an innovative affordable housing project and one the country’s first modernist developments. The 28 tract homes, of which only a handful remain, hark back to a time when living in beautiful architecture surrounded by nature was not just a privilege of the uber-rich. They—along with the craftsman-style homes, and their many elderly owners—remind us of a time before Los Angeles was out-of-reach, when the city actually worked for the working class.
And that’s to say nothing of what isn’t considered capital "A" Architecture. What could be the costliest wildfire in our country’s history took places of worship, galleries, pizza places, hardware stores, coffee shops, bars. People rag on Los Angeles for its lack of public space, but perhaps this is why where we choose to gather feels so important. On the annihilated waterfront stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu once sat local haunts (and tourist attractions) that were emblematic of a Los Angeles Americana that’s quickly becoming lost to time. The Reel Inn: surfboards hanging from the ceiling, twinkle lights, checkered table clothes on weathered wood tables; the tiki-inspired patio overlooking the ocean at Moonshadows; Cholada Thai’s humble baby blue surf shack and groovy signage.
The Topanga Motel built by William Randolph Hearst in 1929 to house workers building the Pacific Coast Highway was one of the last examples of a bungalow motel in the state.
Photo by Montes-Bradley via Getty Images
My mind keeps returning to one day eight years ago, when my mother came to visit and I took her up the coast for both of us to really experience Malibu up close for the first time. I am from San Francisco, but I’d never seen anything quite like this. My mouth was agape at the coastline—an almost terrifying natural beauty punctuated by a random assortment of development: a gaudy beige ’80s mansion next to a dark midcentury cabin next to a contemporary glass box. (This is the same area where Nobu is across the street from McDonald’s). On that drive, it clicked for me: Los Angeles is called the "city of dreams" because of how many different people come here chasing their own particular one. For better or worse, there are all kinds of manifestations of the American dream in L.A.—and you can see that in its built environment.
Frank Lloyd Wright once said: "Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles." In no other place could a rabbit-obsessed couple run a Bunny Museum featuring 35,000 pieces of bunny paraphernalia for over 30 years. (RIP, for now.) It’s no wonder I spend so much time wandering my neighborhood and wondering what eccentric lives in each home. Today, the air quality was good enough to resume my practice, but that curious exercise is now an excruciating one.
Beyond meeting our basic human needs, "home" is an isolated place where we get to express our unique point of view. But we don’t often acknowledge how our personal world-building impacts each other’s landscapes, or a whole city. Even if you aren’t close friends with the people on your block, that one guy’s house on the corner is a signal to turn right on your way back from work; the family of four’s Christmas lights are a reminder that the holiday season must be coming soon. It doesn’t matter if you live in a maximalist bungalow, a white box, or an old prewar building: climate change has us contending with the human impulse to make beauty, and in our current moment, the pain of learning it’s not permanent—for us or our neighbors.
Top photo of destruction by the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, on January 9, 2025. By Zoe Meyers/AFP via Getty Images.
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