Bobcat_Fire,_Los_Angeles,_San_Gabriel_Mountains wikimedia commons

How Should Architects Respond to the L.A. Conflagration?

Los Angeles has experienced a hellish week-plus of wildfires that have destroyed thousands of buildings and uprooted countless lives. As of this writing, the fires continue to burn, and the death tolls are mounting. If the past is prologue, the brutal tragedies of this moment will be subjected to the wisdom of Rahm Emmanuel, who famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” 

Finding opportunity in a disaster is just who we are. Humans survive wars and reform culture; we endure pandemics and discover medical miracles, and out of the ashes, we build. And architects are altogether human, so I do wonder: how soon will we start seeing stylish renderings of hip and thoughtful and ludicrous buildings pop up on the internet, proclaiming “A Resilient, Fireproof Future for the Pacific Palisades”?

Architects have often used fires, hurricanes, or wars as pretexts for their own aspirations. Of course we also use our skill and experience to help mitigate the desperation caused by disasters. Or we use these traumatic events to promote ourselves. When the latter occurs, bad ideas and bad buildings result. A couple of generations after the orgy of building in post–World War II Europe, a number of high modernist disasters were torn down because they were unlivable, sometimes offensive to the communities they sprang from. 

Most buildings are one-offs, isolated responses to circumstance. But disasters happen and they propel the desires of architects, even in the most dire circumstances. ​​Edward Robbins and Paula Dietz in Architectural Review, addressing how some architects responded to 9/11, wrote: “Architects, with a few exceptions, rather than ask questions or undertake good works, began before the ashes of the World Trade Center were even cold to provide answers and to seek work.” Hurricane Katrina gave birth to thousands of “Katrina Houses.” But it also produced the playpen of architectural caprice with the New Orleans “Make It Right” houses, where the designers’ need for self expression trumped the needs of the residents. Some of these homes were gifts of innovation, others were severe miscalculations.

The fire at Notre Dame Cathedral put a spotlight on the self-indulgent, tone deaf, ego projection of many architects. “The public’s response to the blaze was universal sorrow and fear,” I wrote previously in Common Edge. “One would think that architects could sense that cultural sadness and hold their aesthetic fire until the extent of the damage to Notre-Dame was known. But some couldn’t resist their worst impulses, proffering ‘solutions’ that did not respond to the loss of an icon, but took advantage of it—and so quickly that one wonders if there was other work to be done in these offices.” More than 100 architects, including Sir Norman Foster, offered up their visions for a “new” Notre Dame. What was eventually rebuilt was a re-making of the icon (minus the starchitecting). 

Just as doctors and nurses were at the center of the world during the pandemic, architects are likely to play key roles in the aftermath of the fire. There are hard realities that architects can help to define and create. Fire-resistant buildings will now become a necessity in Los Angeles, and that technology will have aesthetic and performance outcomes that will need refinement. 

We adapt, we change, we survive. But the emotional devastation is always fresh, despite its familiarity—and if architects are useful that reality has to be part of their design perspective. Two things help people cope with emotional devastation: hope and listening. Architects often project hope with striking innovation and beauty. But as a profession, we have trouble listening. Fifteen years ago, I invited a group of architects to talk about doing work for a local not-for-profit. Almost instantly “great ideas” were launched by the architects, independent of the needs of the organization. No one listened or asked questions after we solicited their thoughts. The executive director rolled his eyes. The meeting was about the designers, not the world that needed them.

The healing response to disaster is not about aesthetics, but about our common humanity. The power of hope is as real as the fear of destruction. We’re in a place where architects need to listen first and design second. We can make our designs more resilient, more efficient, more fire resistant, but the resiliency of humanity is predicated on embracing the pain and fragility that architects often ignore when the opportunity to build is thrust upon them. 

When the Salvation Army responds to tragedy, are they proselytizing Christianity, or following its tenets? The core tenets of architecture—the three criteria of Vitruvius: “Fitness, Commodity and Delight”—seem especially important today. “Fitness” means that what architects do has relevance for the entire context of the culture and community. That should come before the “Delight” our profession is so obsessed by. Yes, one-off attempts at genius can be captivating, but they’re meaningless in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. To truly be of service, architects will have to learn to listen.

Regardless of how they started, these fires are the result of 100 years of decisions about water, the ecology, and land use, and may be a glimpse at our collective future in a world distorted by climate change. The future shocks that we will all experience are unknowable. But at a time when the world’s buildings will be faced with unknowable threats, some perhaps as extreme as the fires raging in California, architects can have an important role. If they listen, first, design second. If architects simply project themselves into our buildings, we fail humanity. And I think that means we fail ourselves, too.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

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