L.A. architects are reimagining resilient homes

In a post-fire analysis of the 1961 Bel Air Fire, a brush fire that swept through wealthy hamlets of L.A. and destroyed nearly 500 houses, [the authors] explicitly called out contemporary design features, including wood roofs and shingles, eaves and windows, as “architectural invitations of disaster.” Rebuilding focused on reducing the number of ways embers—which cause 90 percent of home fires—could attach themselves to residential dwellings and helped reform building codes and the way Southern California thought about wildfire resilience. 

Today, Angelenos face a similar challenge as they rebuild from the deadly Palisades and Eaton fires that swept the city in January.  Amid an array of challenges—acquiring materials, debris clearance, permitting, finding labor, and dealing with insurance payouts—residents must contend with the responsibility of resiliency, making sure whatever homes they ultimately reside in don’t become “the fuel that propagates the spread of a fire into a community that destroys so much of a city that so many people love,” says Kimiko Barrett, lead wildfire researcher for Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group focused on community development. 

Experts agree that, despite angst and anxiety over the recovery process in L.A., the process has been relatively fast so far, with speedy debris clearance, a score of initiatives to help design and construct homes, and an expected flood of permits and plans set to begin submission and evaluation throughout the rest of the year. As of the first week of September, 650 rebuild permits have been filed in the city of L.A. for the Palisades rebuild, for instance, with 165 approved, out of a total of roughly 6,800 destroyed or damaged properties. A number of architecture firms and collectives, such as Case Study 2.0, have been working on catalogs of fire-resistant designs homeowners can use to rebuild more quickly. 

“I was on the ground in the Palisades late August, and I was amazed,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by wildfire survivors. “I’ve never seen this many homes in progress after a megafire in this period of time.”

In the town of Paradise, burnt down by the deadly Camp Fire in 2018, roughly 25% of the structures have been rebuilt in the last seven years, said Steve Hawks, senior director for wildfire for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), which has long worked with and advised communities recovering from wildfires.

Resilience versus transformation

But in terms of coming back both rapidly and resiliently, there are concerns, as well as a yearning to go beyond just rebuilding.

“The definition of resiliency is to rebound your system to a state before the environmental shock,” said Barrett. “What we're talking about, in the sense of what we're looking at for decreasing wildfire risk and making homes and communities safer, is actually transformation. How do you fundamentally transform how people are thinking about wildfires to do things differently?”

In the entire Palisades area and some areas of the Eaton Fire, buildings are required to build to Code 7A, the state’s nation-leading resiliency requirements; much of the Eaton fire-impacted area, which is in Los Angeles County, not the city, doesn’t require the 7A standard. But experts have been advocating much more. Many recommend building to Zone 0, a landscaping designation that eliminates plants, brush, and groundcover from any area within five feet of the main home. And the IBHS has been pushing its Wildfire Prepared Home Plus level designation, which provides industry-recommended guidelines to build back and reduce the danger of flames, radiant heat, and embers.  

“Mitigation starts with each property doing their part,” said Hawks. “But it has to be done at scale across entire neighborhoods to really build resilience for the neighborhood to withstand these fires. So now is the perfect opportunity for people to implement all of these actions.”

Efforts to strengthen mandatory building codes and add more requirements have all failed, wilting in the face of public and political pressure to rebuild faster, and allow traumatized homeowners and residents to rebuild as close to their original homes as possible. The city’s building department has begun using Archistar, an AI program that helps check permitting applications to speed up rebuilding; Archistar CEO Dr. Benjamin Coorey said the program has taken weeks of permitting evaluation and provides a first check for architects looking to experiment on new designs. 

California governor Gavin Newsom and L.A. mayor Karen Bass have both signed a number of executive orders to exempt many fire-stricken areas from certain building requirements and state laws, and in June, Newsom signed a bill that wouldn’t allow state building codes to be updated for the next six years. An effort in the state assembly to create an L.A. County Resilient Rebuilding Authority that would, among other things, coordinate the creation of community open space to improve resiliency, was cut short in August when the bill sponsor decided to withdraw the legislation in the face of criticism.

L.A. County also decided against including all of the Eaton Fire area in the local fire severity map, which would have mandated stricter standards. The state’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection is working on updating landscape requirements along the lines of Zone 0, but, ongoing process is unlikely to release final recommendations before the end of the year. Hawks said that means a vast majority of the structures that have been lost won’t need to meet Code 7A or Zone 0.

“We don't have a proven track record here in Southern California; in California, more broadly; and really in a lot of places, of making those types of decisions quickly,” says  Michael Lens, an urban planning and policy professor at UCLA . “If you have a lot of complicated, resiliency focused plan-making going on, that’s just going to slow things down, because we don’t make planning decisions and approve things quickly.”

This has put the onus of additional resiliency on architects, developers, residents, and community groups. Many architects and local foundations have been focused on resilient methods and even planning out approved blueprints of resilient home designs that homeowners can utilize. Other groups are investing in fire safety. The $250 million Delta Fund will help cover the cost differential between a traditional rebuild and one that meets exceptional fire safety standards.

Mitigating fire risk through good design

Architects have a big role to play. Design can help mitigate risk, especially by respecting defensible areas on lots and avoiding more complicated structures that can trap embers. But for resiliency, the most important design decisions involve materials, especially non-combustibles for the roofs, siding and eaves, and two-pane tempered glass windows. Architect Dustin Bramell, who lost his own mid-century modern Pacific Palisades home in the blaze, helped form Case Study Adapt, which challenges 10 L.A. architecture firms to create new visions of resilient single-family homes. The group plans to release its designs in the fall, but Bramell says there’s been inspiring creativity around approaching new visions for resilient Southern California architecture that meets and exceeds codes while  also offering landscaping that reflects changing norms and safety recommendations.

This includes wrestling with how materials like concrete walls impact resilience–and how they can get quickly approved by city building officials–as well as how landscaping concepts like water features can be incorporated to make yards more lush and safe. Bramell and others are looking at ways to break up main homes and garages and accessory dwelling units, separating structures to create fire breaks. He hopes to find a way to experiment that breaks through some of the inertia in the rebuilding process. 

“The entire system, with insurance, is set up to [re]build what you had,” he said. “We’ll replace the house you had. But we’re not going to contribute funds to make your house more fireproof. It’s a strange situation where if you’re building something more likely to burn down, you’re actually more likely to get a permit.” 

Hawks said that the IBHS has been working on a study with Headwater Economics looking at the costs of rebuilding to the Wildfire Prepared Plus designation that will come out later this fall.  So far, researchers have found that these additional precautions carry little additional upfront cost; factor in the long-term insurance savings that would come from achieving that level of resiliency, and it becomes a more cost-effective strategy. Barrett added that post-fire analyses have shown that spending now saves in the long run: every $1 in upfront mitigation spending yields $4 in long-term savings, she said.

“Especially for the Eaton fire, residents will have many choices and won’t be required to build back to a high standard,” Hawks said. “So it’s critically important they build back to withstand a future fire event.”

Patrick Sisson is a freelance writer covering architecture and design. He lives in Los Angeles.