L.A. architects are reimagining resilient homes

Story By aia.org.

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, Captain Harold Greenwood of the Los Angeles Fire Department 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.

“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.”