Pacific Palisades: when Los Angeles burns down its architecture and history

Between Case Study Houses by Eames and Neutra, and buildings by Ray Kappe and Charles Moore, a vast modern and contemporary heritage has been threatened or destroyed by fire, as the city that is devouring its history.

What comes out of Los Angeles, ravaged by a fire that has only been partially tamed, is the image of a place that is devouring its history, those very signs that represent it and that at different times have tried to change it: architectures, in a word. Pacific Palisades, the epicentre of the now infamous Palisades Fire, is a place that contains much of this history and is now threatened every new day. The Palisades is the area most affected by the fire, with a devastated area of 81 square kilometres, larger than Manhattan Island.

Once you get past the unsustainable media hype about Paris Hilton's or Adam Brody's burnt-out houses, Los Angeles appears to be a city “equalized in inequality”, with people seeing houses they do not own burned down, and others who do own them and could not insure them against a fire because of insurance premiums that skyrocketed months before the disaster. There are reports of private fire-fighting teams hired by individual owners for sums ranging from large to astronomical. There is the uniform pink patina of fire retardant sprayed on cars, houses and trees. And all this without getting into deepfakes and conspiracy theories.
 


The Palisades is a point where the city's waterfront presence begins to shift, a series of rocky outcrops separated by canyons that plunge into the Pacific, between the flat orthogonal fabric of Santa Monica and the one-dimensional string of coastal houses that is Malibu Road. Here, Spanish Revival and Deco mansions of the 1920s and 1930s were quickly overlaid by other histories: the diaspora of European intellectuals such as Thomas Mann, and the Case Study Houses, to name but a few.

Launched in 1945 by Arts&Architecture magazine, the Case Study Houses programme aimed to develop prototype dwellings with high levels of innovation and low construction costs, and over 20 years and 36 projects, with names such as Craig Ellwood, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and Pierre Koenig, it gave a modern face to American mid-century. In what Cal Fire (the California fire unit) designates as the area still on fire falls Raphael Soriano's CSH 1950, the first in the programme to have an all-steel structure, heavily modified over the years. In the middle of the evacuation order zone, on the Palisades, we find House No. 9, designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen for John Entenza, director of Arts&Architecture and of the programme, with its steel structure and pure juxtaposition of wood and glass; next door is the iconic Eames house and studio, soon threatened by fire, still so far spared; not far away are Houses Nos. 18 and 20, namely Rodney Walker's West House and Richard Neutra's Bailey House, built between 1947 and 1948. Not far away is the Thomas Mann House, whose structure also withstood the fire – although information is awaited as to any damage to the wealth of documents it contains –which, designed by Julius Ralph Davidson in the early 1940s, is a modernist gem outside the Case Study programme. As were two other gems, this time late-modern, the Robert Bridges House, with its brutal concrete overhangs overlooking Sunset Boulevard, and the Keeler House, completed in the early 1990s by Sci-Arc co-founder Ray Kappe, unfortunately dominated by wood as a building material and completely destroyed by fire. The same can be said of the two pieces of architecture in which Charles Moore was involved, the Spanish Neo-Revival Burns House of 1974 and Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church, which has now been saved.
 


To the north, however, away from the Palisades, the Eaton fire moved into the dense suburbs where other Case Study Houses had sprung up: No. 20, Bass House, a dialogue between lightly vaulted roofs and solid masonry cylinders, completed in 1958 by Buff, Straub and Hensman; and No. 15 Alpha, again by Davidson, in La Cañada. While there are no reports of damage to these, it is known that the fire completely destroyed the 28 units built by Gregory Ain with Garrett Eckbo for the Park Planned Houses programme, workers' housing set in a continuous park that revolutionised the idea of suburbia and became a symbol of the American way to modernity.

Projects such as Case Study and Park Planned were born in the aftermath of a world conflict, to transform from war to civilisation an industry in full expansion, to invent democratic models of living, driven by a new local and at the same time modern spirit, emancipated from Eurocentric influences, bringing together young names and future protagonists of contemporary history. True visions of a different urban society of the future, which we find today in danger of being wiped out by the products of that same city and society: among the many conclusions that can be drawn from these facts, let us add the wish that we do not have to update this article and extend the list.
 

Opening image: Photo Los Angeles Fire Department from Flickr

Discovering Montreux, Lausanne, and Geneva

From the Olympic Museum in Lausanne to the Science Gateway designed by Renzo Piano and the enchanting Christmas markets, Switzerland offers a perfect car-free escape filled with beauty, culture, and holiday magic.

  • Sponsored content

Latest on Architecture

Latest on Domus

Read more
China Germany India Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Sri Lanka Korea icon-camera close icon-comments icon-down-sm icon-download icon-facebook icon-heart icon-heart icon-next-sm icon-next icon-pinterest icon-play icon-plus icon-prev-sm icon-prev Search icon-twitter icon-views icon-instagram