L.A. Fires: One Year Later  

Architectural Record explores the challenges to rebuilding—and the progress made—in the neighborhoods devastated by last January’s fires.

Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles.

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The Case Study Program Gets a Reboot

By Sarah Amelar

Images: © Marmol Radziner

Marmol Radziner’s CSA #2 is one of many metal-clad house schemes in the two new Case Study programs.

Like thousands of fellow residents of Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods, Dustin Bramell and his family hastily evacuated on January 7, 2025, as raging wildfire encroached. By the next day, their beloved midcentury-modern home was gone, reduced to ash and rubble, along with nearly their entire Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

Bramell had barely begun processing the loss when, that same day, an idea came to him: Could he revive the Case Study Houses program (1945–66) to help rebuild after the fires? Within three months, he and his friend Leo Seigal—a fellow tech entrepreneur and architecture enthusiast—had self-funded and launched Case Study: Adapt (CSA), a nonprofit that would, like the original program, pair clients with architects to create innovative houses to address personal and far-reaching challenges. From its inception, in L.A., the Case Study experiment aspired to tackle the post–World War II housing shortage, and now the most urgent issues were the many displaced Palisades and Altadena residents, along with the global threat of wildfire and other climate-change fallout.

Where the first Case Study program was inextricably linked to Arts & Architecture magazine, CSA joined with Architectural Digest to reach a wide audience. “We realized that what began as just a cool idea was actually a chance to make fire-resilient design inspirational for the public at large,” says Bra­mell (who comes from a family of firefighters and fire chiefs). His venture also partnered with the Eames Foundation, whose 1949 Case Study House #8 and Studio—which barely escaped the Palisades Fire—has hosted CSA’s idea-generating meetings.

Around the same time, another (somewhat different) initiative emerged, independently, from the Case Study legacy. Called Case Study 2.0 (CS 2.0), it’s the brainchild of brothers Steven and Jason Somers, cofounders of Crest Real Estate, an L.A. land-use and architectural-expediting company experienced in the now fire-torn neighborhoods. “The overwhelming devastation left so many people in shock and unsure what to do next,” recalls Steven. “We realized that our expertise with regulations, permitting, and construction—with bringing architectural ideas to fruition—put us in a unique position to help.”

They also recognized the concern, within the affected communities, that developers might buy up lots, resulting, as Steven puts it, “in many practical homes without any distinctive architectural qualities.” So CS 2.0 set out to create an online catalogue of designs that could simplify and streamline the process for homeowners while, ideally, yielding architectural richness and diversity at costs competitive with standardized construction.

The Somerses reached out to architects they admired and had worked with—established and lesser-known local talent, plus practices worldwide that had built in L.A. Unlike the pure modernism of Case Study Houses, their program offers eclectic styles, recalling, says Steven, “the unique character and variety of these neighborhoods.” By December, CS 2.0 had 50 participating firms, 12 projects in contract, and many under discussion. Click here to read more...

Three Palisades Schools Rebuild for the Future

By Matt Hickman

The future academic building at Palisades Charter High School interweaves indoor-outdoor spaces to foster community and connect with the landscape.

IN THE AFTERMATH of a May 22, 2011, tornado that leveled large swaths of Joplin, Missouri, DLR Group played a key role in rebuilding as the designer, with CHGA Architects, of interim and permanent public high schools to replace the one lost on that date—in a cruel twist, the same day as graduation. “The school became the center of the community and helped, in the rebuilding process, as a social anchor,” says Alenoush Aghajanians, principal and senior design leader at DLR Group, emphasizing the school’s role as an essential civic presence as the city gradually emerged from the rubble.

The urgency and breakneck mobilization involved in building Joplin’s new high school, along with the opportunity to reimagine educational strategies and build back better, provided DLR Group with a sturdy foundation to embark on a project currently under way in Los Angeles: a new two-story classroom building on the campus of Pali­sades Char­ter High School. Colloquially known as Pali High, the school suffered damage during the Palisades Fire in January 2025, which decimated coastal L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood and surrounding communities as it raged for nearly a month. The school, however, was somewhat lucky, as much of its campus—established in 1961 in a filled-in canyon below Sunset Boulevard and famed as a filming location for many movie and television productions—was largely spared from the widespread destruction. An aging 1950s shop building, which the fire-resilient new academic hub replaces, and several portable classroom buildings were the only structures completely lost to the inferno, with roughly 70 percent of the classroom inventory surviving.

The reimagined Pali High campus is one of three school rebuilding projects in progress in the fire-ravaged Palisades as part of a
$604 million initiative led by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Just to the east of Pali High, near the commercial core of the neighborhood, is Palisades Elementary Charter School. Heavily damaged by the wildfires and losing multiple buildings, that compact campus, which features a surviving historic main administration/classroom building, is being redeveloped with local firm Practice (formerly GGA+) serving as project architect. To the west, Marquez Charter Elementary, which suffered a total loss (save for three portables), is being rebuilt as a 53,000-square-foot building with a design by NAC Architecture.

Each of the three LAUSD projects is slated to be completed by the end of 2028. With varying budget sizes, they employ fire-adaptive materials and resilient landscaping, along with rigorous sustainability measures, as mandated by the district.

Meanwhile, the Marquez and Pali High campuses have since reopened—in September and later this year, respectively—following extensive clean-up efforts and environmental testing. While rebuilding is in progress, modular classroom units have been installed, and, at Pali High, surviving, smoke-remediated buildings are being repopulated to get students back on campus as soon as possible. (Palisades Charter Elementary students and staff will remain at Brentwood Science Mag­net School for the foreseeable future, while their campus is fully reconstructed.) Click here to read more...

Addressing the Wildfire Knowledge Gap

By Joann Gonchar, FAIA

Jonah Susskind, director of climate strategy at SWA.

In 2023, global landscape architecture firm SWA Group released Playbook for the Pyrocene, a print and digital open-access publication outlining rules of thumb and applied strategies for wildfire-risk reduction at the neighborhood scale. The publication synthesizes key concepts from ecology, fire science, forestry, and land-use planning, to provide design guidance. record’s deputy editor, Joann Gonchar, talked with Jonah Susskind, SWA’s director of climate strategy and one of the principal investigators for the publication. Suss­kind, based in SWA’s Sausalito, California, office, spoke about the motivation for the research and its continued relevance.

Image © SWA

SWA’s Playbook for the Pyrocene illustrates six rules of thumb and 20 strategies for wildfire-risk reduction. 

When did you start working on Playbook for the Pyrocene? Was the impetus a particular event or fire?

We didn’t formally start working on it until early 2022. But there had been a growing realization across the firm that we needed to better understand wildfire dynamics and best practices for landscape planning and design. That began a couple of years earlier, after the Glass Fire in 2020, which scorched a number of buildings and forested areas on two ongoing SWA projects in Sonoma and Napa counties. Our offices had been working with those clients for many years before that fire really changed our remit. Coincidentally, right around the time of the Glass Fire, a group of us in our Sausalito studio were working on fire-related research in and around Paradise, California, which had been almost entirely destroyed during the 2018 Camp Fire. It is important to also point out, with four studios in the state, SWA has been working in fire-prone landscapes for decades.

Can you elaborate on the knowledge gap that the book addresses?

During the past couple of decades, there’s been tremendous improvement in land-use planning controls and forestry techniques that reduce risk of wildfire exposure at the scale of the state, the county, or the national forest. There have also been significant innovations and advancements in building codes and noncombustible materials, along with well-published guidelines for defensible space, intended to support homeowners at the ­individual-parcel scale. So, Playbook for the Pyrocene tailors its strategies to the in-between scale—at the level of the community—with a focus on the work that is typically within the purview of a landscape architect.

Can you say a bit more about the role of landscape architecture in reducing wildfire risk at the community scale?

We design parks, but we don’t always talk about them as emergency refuge areas. In fact, we almost never do. But during the Camp Fire, which tore through the town of Para­dise, and was one of the deadliest wildfires in American history, dozens of lives were saved when people who couldn’t evacuate in time took shelter in a park with irrigated ball fields and open green space. We can design parks as emergency refuges and also as staging areas for firefighting personnel. Trails can serve as a multimodal mobility corridors or as evacuation routes. This is the type of layering that we need to do more of.

How are the strategies outlined in Playbook for the Pyrocene shaping current projects?

In Pacific Palisades, we’re working on the redesign of a neighborhood community center and park that were damaged by last January’s fire using many of the core concepts presented in the book. The project is still in community-listening phases. Click here to read more...

Erasure in a Historically Black Neighborhood

By Victor Jones

Photo © Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo

As climate change reshapes the American landscape and habitable land shrinks, people are forced to reconsider what it means to be “on safe ground.” The Eaton Fire in Altadena makes for one such reckoning. Cycles of risk and recovery have deep roots in this country, and the burdens they impose are never evenly borne. Some rebuild while others are left behind. This is the story of Altadena’s Black community.

Through the 1960s, restrictive covenants and redlining barred Black Americans from neighboring Pasadena and Los Angeles. Altadena, an unincorporated area in the San Gabriel foothills, offered something different: a place to own land. Over the decades, residents erected modest bungalows, ranch houses, and architect-designed residences, built in defiance of the very systems designed to exclude them.

On January 7, 2025, the Eaton Fire swept through, destroying over 6,000 homes. Black-owned homes suffered disproportionate losses, with 6 in 10 destroyed, the highest damage rate for any racial group. Today, brick chimneys stand over empty lots as totems of what once was there. What has been lost are not merely structures but a collective spatial memory, the material record of Black placemaking in Southern California erased in a single event. Yet recovery itself threatens to complete what the fire began—displacement.

Ironically, the unincorporated status that once enabled Black homeownership now limits residents’ ability to access recovery resources. This structural vulnerability was evident from the outset: only one fire truck reached the predominantly Black western section in the first 12 hours. The path forward has been marked by obstacles: contaminated soil, underinsurance, and slow permitting, all exacerbated by reduced federal support. FEMA assistance has totaled less than a third of what previous California disaster survivors received, due both to the unprecedented scale of simultaneous fires and to the Trump Administration’s punitive shift in federal aid policies. Altadena’s unincorporated status compounds these challenges, eliminating access to the municipal resources and advocacy that incorporated cities can leverage for their residents.

The question now is not just how to rebuild, but who will return, and on what terms.

A grim answer has begun to emerge. Accord­ing to UCLA researchers, 73 percent of Black homeowners showed no progress toward reconstruction nine months after the fire. The gap between decades-old insurance coverage and soaring construction costs is unbridgeable for many Altadena households. Unable to rebuild, residents sell to investors and developers acquiring parcels at reduced prices. County data show only 282 Altadena permits issued by late November 2025, compared to more than 1,070 in Pacific Palisades, as reported by the Los Angeles mayor’s office, a fourfold disparity. Click here to read more...