The Los Angeles wildfires — social, urban, envi­ronmental catastrophes — mark a bitter, ash-tinged end of the Western imaginary. In the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena, the American dream of a domestic pastoral has gone up in smoke, a burnt offering to the gods of 20th-century real estate development.

Its acrid stench reached me on January 7, a Tuesday night whipped by howling winds. Earlier in the day, while driving the 134 Freeway from Pasadena to Silver Lake, I had seen a plume rising over the Westside: the Palisades Fire. I found it concerning, but distant, like a black and white photograph of an atomic bomb. By evening, Altadena was aflame. The community tucked into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains is just a few miles from my apartment, its closeness driven home as evacuation orders and red flag warnings lit up my phone. Propelled by Santa Ana winds, ash travelled that distance quickly.

I bought my one-bedroom condo a few years ago, desperate to get out of the precarious rental market. Concrete and glass on a street of wood and stucco, my apartment building was built in the mid-sixties by a mostly unknown disciple of Richard Neutra. We dubbed it the “Swiss Parking Garage.” I immedi­ately loved the unit’s floor-to-ceiling windows. That night, those sliding glass doors proved a liability. Smoke leaked in through the imperfections in the aging aluminum frame.

“All good architecture leaks” is a truism whose origins can be traced back to Frank Lloyd Wright. He was talking about roofs, not windows, as if rain was our biggest worry in a season of drought. I taped up the edges of the sliding doors, added wadded up newsprint, and went to bed hoping that the infrastructure of the 10-lane 210 highway would be a substantial enough firebreak if the winds pushed the flames southward.

In the morning, the air was dark and clogged with flying debris. I decided to drive to my par­ents’ house in the Bay Area. Go-bag, terrier and laptop loaded into the car, I headed north.

Southern California architecture is predicated on thinness, best demonstrated in the modernist mien, but not reserved to it. Our structures and our lifestyles capitalize on temperate weather. But the climate crisis is changing — has changed — that relationship, turning it into a myth punctu­ated with quotes from writer Joan Didion (who diagnosed of the Santa Ana winds a kind of collective neurosis). Dry seasons are hotter and longer across the West. Air conditioners wheeze as triple-digit days stretch into weeks. The con­fluence of a warm, arid winter and desert winds sparked these firestorms, making January (and not the usual September) the fire season. Neither hardened nor resilient, most of our architecture is ill-equipped for this new normal.

Modernist tenets of indoor–outdoor living and light­weight building systems, as famously demonstrated in the Case Study homes, rely on a conception of nature as largely benign. Boundaries between domestic life and landscape are porous, and architecture acts as a membrane. Los Angeles is a place of freedom; to build with — or against — nature largely consists of relegating our doubts to code books. As such, we are routinely surprised when disaster shakes us from the lull of false security. (The sharp pain of rising homeowners insurance is perhaps the rudest of awakenings for those not immediately impacted by fire.) Houses perched on hillsides and neighbourhoods pushed into canyons represent design and sub­urbanesque planning ideologies that privilege the aesthetics of nature over the consequences of nature — ensuring top market value.

Ray Kappe’s Keeler House, before it was destroyed by fire.

The Eaton and Palisades wildfires were, of course, not discriminating with regards to archi­tectural style. Angelenos lost more than 15,000 homes and structures: Mission Revival edifices, ornate McMansions, Craftsman bungalows, and low-slung ranches. In Altadena, a historically Black neighbourhood turned to ash, the fire erased multi-generational homes. Will Rogers’s movie-star ranch house, a 1926 old-timey snap­shot of the Wild West, succumbed, as did Robert Bridges’s precariously sited house, which teetered over Sunset Boulevard on stilts. Gone, too, is the Keeler House (1991) by SCI-Arc founder Ray Kappe; its redwood structure seemed to float above the hillside, and its decks stretched out toward the Pacific Ocean as if yearning for even more view. Photographs after the wildfire show three concrete cores rising from the ruins.

In 1923, my hometown of Berkeley was rav­aged by fire. A half-century later, my parents purchased the Spanish-style house I grew up in. It was the second structure to be built on the property, the first destroyed along with 640 oth­ers as neighbourhoods north of the UC Berkeley campus burned. There is a reminder of catas­trophe in front of my parents’ house: the curb cut of an original driveway. I hadn’t thought much of it as a fire scar until I fled the smoke, drove 376 miles and parked on the street.

One hundred years passed. The neighbour­hood reconstituted itself over the course of the 20th century, wood and stucco, wood and stucco winding further and further up the hill. A notable exception: Bernard Maybeck’s fireproof Sack House (1924), built on the foundation of his family’s home, which was lost in the blaze. The roof and exterior walls were covered in what Maybeck called “Bubblestone,” an architectural experiment where burlap sacks are dipped in a mixture of glue, Portland cement, sand and water, then hand-draped over wooden slats.

Los Angeles is readying itself to rebuild — quickly. Both Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom have issued orders to fast-track new construction. Given the enormous devastation in Altadena, Pacific Palisades and Malibu, such an expedi­ent response is intended to serve the people tragically impacted. I’ve seen a spreadsheet of more than 400 GoFundMe pages, each documenting an unbearable personal toll and pleading for assistance.

Yet we haven’t taken a collective pause to consider just how to rebuild. I want to advocate for more experimental approaches to construc­tion à la Maybeck’s Bubblestone. A recent exhi­bition at Craft Contemporary, entitled “Material Acts,” explored the art and science of creating new architecture construction elements. On view were dozens of innovations — from myce­lium textiles to gravel knit into structural forms by robots. The design practice Rael San Fratello contributed a large-format 3D-printed adobe dome, a high-tech take on fire-resistant adobe block masonry. A recent petition started by environmental activist and educator Marysia Miernowska demands that the City of Pasadena rebuild using “fire-resistant, natural building technologies” such as cob, straw bale, super-adobe, and rammed earth. Certainly, there are lessons here.

Rael San Fratello’s prototype domes made of 3D-printed adobe.

Still, insurance payoffs often only allow the reproduction of what was lost, if that. This traps us in a vicious cycle. And yet, to suggest that California’s chaparral ecology is a reoccur­ring hazard zone that should be off-limits to construction, as Mike Davis does in “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” (Ecology of Fear, 1998), is an affront to those left without a neighbourhood, home, business or school. This is a fire paradox.

And there’s another. Even before the fires, Los Angeles was in need of housing: affordable, equitable, missing middle, market rate — all of it. In an effort to address the issue, California passed laws to incentivize the construction of more units in residential neighbourhoods. A suite of state bills addressed accessory dwelling units and the California HOME Act (Senate Bill 9) allows for up to four units on a single-family parcel. As infill within the urban fabric, these initiatives make a lot of sense, but in the aftermath of catastrophe, they have a possible darker outcome. If homeowners or developers choose to rebuild at a higher density, it puts more people in high-risk areas. Like all dystopias, this one would be unevenly distrib­uted, with wealthy enclaves in a better position to reconstruct their estates and working and middle-class areas left to cope.

In 1998, the same year Davis published Ecology of Fear, writer and environmental­ist John McPhee’s iconic essay “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” appeared in the New Yorker. It vividly captured the disaster-movie reality of living in a metropolis that sprawls into the foothills of the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains, focusing not on fire but on mudslides. And it explored the clever system of dams, channels and basins that vein the hill­sides, which help buffer residential areas from debris flows — and the cost of cleanup. “Were it not for the alert, unflinching manner and imagi­native strategies by which Los Angeles outwits the mountains, nature’s invoices at such times would run into the billions,” McPhee wrote.

Could there be a parallel infrastructure to protect against wildfires? A defensible space that operates not at the scale of the individual home but at the municipal level, perhaps? A strategy of degrowth, where the state purchases properties (such as along Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway)? This could establish networks of parks, ponds, or the mammoth engineering equivalent of the MOSE project that guards Venice, Italy, from mass flooding. These grand schemes might be pipe dreams brought on by grief and toxic winds, or maybe they are visions of what a collective rebuilding might endeavour.

I returned to Pasadena a week after the fires; the air quality was better but not great. I was fine, my condo was fine. When I walked around my neighbourhood, it was eerily normal, except that everything was covered in a fine layer of soot. Downed palm fronds and branches were piled high on curbs waiting for the otherwise dis­tracted City of Pasadena crews to pick them up.

As I write this, it’s raining in Los Angeles. Not enough to cause mudslides in burn areas but, I hope, enough to dampen the hillsides and assist firefighters in putting out lingering hot spots. When it stops, the sky over the basin will sparkle, scrubbed clean of particulate, and we’ll continue the long path to recovery.

Opening image showing remains of Altadena Community Church by Chris Pizzello.