February 2025 Editor’s Letter
A Time for Reflection
As we were preparing to ship this issue to the printer in early January, the city of Los Angeles erupted in flames. At press time, we could only be sure of the immense devastation, with new blazes igniting and no fully adequate infrastructure for containment. Despite the frequency of wildfires in that part of the country, it was immediately evident that this was different—the kind of inferno that could potentially alter the city forever, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which killed hundreds and destroyed over 17,000 structures.
Part of the reason that fire spread so flagrantly in Chicago was the ubiquity of balloon framing in the city, a construction method pioneered there in the 1830s and one that is still very much in use in the U.S. today. At the time of the disaster, Chicago had minimal fire-safety codes. It had no schools of architecture and only a handful of architects who could train apprentices. Yet, as Carl W. Condit noted in The Chicago School of Architecture (1964), “in little more than a decade after the fire they invented and mastered the modern technique of riveted steel framing and were thus able to develop the office building, hotel, and apartment block as we know them today.” Advances in the use of terra-cotta as a fireproof cladding method also followed. Firefighting capacity was expanded, new building codes implemented, and Chicago emerged as one of the country’s most modern and prosperous urban spaces.
The story now is quite the opposite, with a vast network of international architects, engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, building scientists, and material experts at the ready to come to L.A.’s aid. But, as Alberto Martínez García writes in “Erasure, Reconstruction, and Standardization,” a Forum piece this month about postwar cities—the apocalyptic scenes in Los Angeles can be likened to that of a war zone—“As a result of global trends, technologies, and standards, many contemporary approaches to postwar city-building have the potential to eliminate local building traditions and regional architectural variation.”
The loss of entire city blocks and neighborhoods—at press time, an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco singed off the map—spurs a strong desire to immediately rebuild in Los Angeles. But how to do so should be seriously considered in a region where requisite conditions—blustery winds and regular drought—could easily cause this to happen again. We can no longer build, or, frankly, exist, according to old standards. As Chicago adapted, so we too must now. But the depth of disciplinary advancement and its data-based understanding of climate science has yet to truly inform policy and governance.
As we watch this crisis unfold, there are stories of the miraculous endurance of certain buildings, like a timber-clad Passive House in Pacific Palisades or an earthquake-proof stone-and-stucco Malibu residence, both of those the sole piles left standing among charred neighbors. Will we heed the lessons these survivors might teach us? What other models exist out there, and what areas of research remain untapped? Will the prevalent use of dimensional lumber give way to less fire-prone materials and methods in construction? How, if at all, will this catastrophe change the building culture?
Architects often play a limited role in the immediate aftermath of a disaster—the urgencies are safety, food, temporary shelter, and social support. The most exigent need of all is beyond the purview of architects but affects them greatly: a forthright and mandatory government program to combat climate change. Without it, architects are creating ephemera, and the timelessness of architecture—long a goal of its best practitioners—is questionable.
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