From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
When the celebrated graphic designer Gere Kavanaugh moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, a friend warned her: ‘If the earthquakes don’t get you, the mudslides will. And if not that, it’s the fires and the riots.’ Such panic about LA has long lived side by side with its allure, a thin line dividing ‘sunshine and noir’. The city can’t shake the phrase, nor the literary references that accompany fire season.
When the annual Santa Ana winds blow in, Raymond Chandler’s words come with them: ‘It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.’ When fires race over brittle chaparral towards the ocean every few years, they’re paired with Mike Davis’s controversial essay of 1995, ‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn’ (the title of which sometimes pulses darkly, and perhaps more drumlike, when you’re weaving by Teslas along the coast, ocean views blocked by empty mansions). Lately, Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic sci-fi book Parable of the Sower (1993) has joined the quotable ranks, presciently imagining a Los Angeles in 2024 of dry reservoirs, gated communities surrounded by desperate mobs and burning buildings.
Fires were always here. Native tribes set controlled burns for thousands of years until they were banned, first by the Spanish then the US government. In 1889, 300,000 acres burned to the south-east of the city. It remained the state’s largest fire for more than a century but has now been dwarfed several times over. Notably, there were no human casualties because the population of LA was only about 100,000 people, their houses not yet snaking up every canyon. Most of those hundred thousand represented the city’s first population boom, in the 1880s, when newcomers were lured by boastful advertisements of a health-giving golden paradise with plentiful cheap land, new opportunities and dry, clean air sure to cure lung ailments. But by 1903, the young city’s industrial emissions darkened the skies so severely that residents mistook it for a sudden solar eclipse. The stage was set for a clash of expectations and a dramatic meeting of contrasts.
In writing about LA’s historic architecture over the years I’ve sought various ways to describe another common contrast: indoor and outdoor spaces and how the design of a building seeks to merge them. This blending is a hallmark of the mild climate and hilly, fertile landscape, inspiring many examples of the city’s great architecture – from early Craftsman sleeping porches to the mid-century Case Study Houses to today.
I was thinking about this celebrated porosity after the recent fires, which occurred in the ‘wildland-urban interface’, an additional convergence of contrasts in which one third of Californians now, perilously, reside. Features at these intersections of inside/outside and urban/wild – such as outdoor living rooms, glass walls and rugged canyon views – are part of what makes the California lifestyle coveted and unique. And also terrifying, when that barely separated outdoors is in flames.
The Bass House (Case Study House #20B), designed by Buff, Straub & Hensman and completed in 1958. Photograph: Julius Shulman; © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004 R. 10)
Recently, a lot of attention was given to a home in the Palisades that survived intact, despite being ringed by destroyed houses. Luck played a role, but so did design. Completed in summer 2024 by Greg Chasen, a local architect who began his career rebuilding homes after the Malibu fires in the 1990s, the austere house includes fire-resistant walls, a metal roof, sealable vents, tempered glass and no eaves or overhangs. The landscaping also prioritised safety with a desert garden cleared of flammable foliage and trees. This ‘hardened’ house was built according to a new paradigm, exchanging the smooth flow of transparent indoor/outdoor for a hard shell, a carapace of defence. This climate-conscious style takes its place in LA’s melange of architectural designs, a glimpse of its possible future.
A couple months ago I came across an article by the writer Nathaniel Rich suggesting that residents of New Orleans were better prepared for climate change than those in most other cities because there was simply no hiding from it. ‘You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer,’ he wrote. Not everyone was living with such blunt awareness but, he insisted, soon we all would be.
Many of us in LA have N95 masks stashed in a drawer, an extra air purifier, phone apps that alert us to fire, earthquakes and air quality, and bottled water in the back of a closet, not to mention the earthquake kits we make and send to preschool with our children. We’ve been living like this for years – like so many others around the world. Some residents will certainly leave this place, in search of somewhere safer. Others will continue balancing the stark contrasts of a gorgeous day at the beach amid warning signs about toxic run-off in the water. The dry winds will continue to blow, the fires will burn again, the famous sun will keep shining
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.