The hills of Altadena sit in an odd, tidy limbo these days, coming up on nine months since the Eaton Fire roared through, killing 19 people in its path and destroying nearly 9,500 structures, more than 6,000 of them single-family houses. Most of the lots in the Eaton burn area, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, which themselves are scarred and denuded, have been scraped by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, though a small number remain covered with tangled piles of debris. Plants and flowers have begun to grow again, at a pace that has surprised many locals; with no homeowners around to tend them, the vegetation stretches between backyards, without deference to property lines.
A few hardy residents have moved trailers onto their lots—you can hear their generators humming and see their lights switch on as dusk falls. But the majority of fire victims have found temporary housing elsewhere in Southern California, staying with relatives or in apartments subsidized by insurance companies, which typically cover 24 months of rent. Those who choose to return and rebuild, and who have the means to do so, face a gauntlet of paperwork and approval procedures to satisfy insurers and public agencies alike. Others who hope to return are confronting the extent to which they were underinsured, or the gap between their insurance payout and the amount it will cost to build a new house.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Aside from the lot-clearing effort and a few modest policy changes to streamline construction—such as allowing homeowners to erect an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), or in-law apartment, before rebuilding their main house, reversing the usual process—by summer, there was no official recovery plan for Los Angeles County. (A plan was finally announced in early August, as this article was going to press, that would offer $50 million in direct financial assistance to fire victims; however, the amount seems unlikely to make those who were underinsured whole.) Tariffs on products like timber and steel, as well as ongoing immigration raids, could push already high building costs higher still. When the hammers do start swinging in earnest, probably early next year, they will usher in what may be a full decade of construction on many Altadena streets, with its attendant noise and dust.
There is one subset of fire victims who have a particularly nuanced perspective on the disaster and its aftermath: architects who lost their own houses in the Eaton Fire. Over the summer, I talked with three of them: Scott Uriu, who runs his own firm, Uriu Architecture, and teaches at the USC School of Architecture; Heather Flood, dean of the Woodbury University School of Architecture; and Michael McDonald, this year’s president of the Pasadena and Foothill branch of the American Institute of Architects. All three are in their 50s and married (two of them, Uriu and McDonald, to fellow designers). And all are envisioning new houses to replace the ones lost in the fire.
What these architects share is a certain optimism—even a kind of excitement, which they express with understandable sheepishness—about the chance to completely rethink the designs of their own houses, and indeed the ways their lives were organized, without having to leave behind their tight-knit Altadena blocks. Every architect I know—and I mean, without hyperbole, every single one—sees the world through a redemptive lens, confident that what they build is capable of improving, even healing, the site where it goes up. These three are certainly no different.
SCOTT URIU
I met up with Scott Uriu and his wife, Angela, on a warm summer morning on the 400 block of Altadena’s Punahou Street, where the couple have lived since 1997 and where they raised their two children, both now in college. Like Scott, Angela was trained as an architect, though she now works for the Harmony Project, a nonprofit that supports music programs in public schools. She has been volunteering as block captain for the Punahou branch of Altagether (short for “Altadena together”), which is helping fire victims stay informed about the county’s recovery and rebuilding process—a task that has given her a front-row seat to some of the dysfunction of that effort. It’s tough to get consistent answers from county officials, she said, on top of which she has to dispel unfounded rumors that she sees spreading on social media, like the recent one that tankless water heaters would be prohibited in new houses in the burn area.
The couple decided fairly quickly that they wanted to rebuild. As Angela put it, “I can imagine older people or people with little kids just not wanting to risk the uncertainty of the process and moving on. We have the benefit of time.”
In the spring, Scott began working on the design of their new house and 1,200-square-foot detached ADU. He is already planning an approach more attuned to the surrounding landscape, and a bit more modern, than the 1939 colonial ranch the family lost. The main house will have an overhanging butterfly roof meant to mimic the silhouette of the San Gabriels.
“I am ex-Gehry,” Scott said, referring to the time he’d spent in architect Frank Gehry’s office early in his career. “[The design] is going to have a little fun to it.”
There will also be some practical design features meant to allow the couple to age in place—the house will be a split-level, a layout that reduces the number of stairs, and will include space for an elevator to be added later on—and a number of provisions for fire safety: metal (instead of wooden) studs, joists, and rafters; concrete-block walls; and standing-seam metal roofs to top the house and the ADU. Having learned that windows, rather than roofs or siding, make houses most vulnerable to fire actually entering the structure, Scott is looking at residential designs in Australia that use large fire-
resistant shutters, which he estimates will cost between $2,500 and $3,000 per large opening.
The couple are planning to install cisterns to collect rainwater and a small lap pool—both of which can be used against a fire if need be, they told me. The insulation on both the house and the ADU will be mineral wool, which offers strong fire protection but also good sound insulation—something Scott thinks may come in handy to soften the construction noise likely to echo up and down his block as his neighbors return.
Not that he is complaining about that prospect. After all, he is designing five other houses on Punahou and two more on adjacent blocks, which will vary in architectural style. Scott said he is hoping that these homes, plus his own and two more nearby designed by other architects, can be packaged as a group of 10 and built by a single contractor, to take advantage of some economies of scale. He has already begun interviewing construction firms.
So far, Scott and Angela told me, they’ve been encouraged by the solidarity they see on their block, where nearly all of their neighbors plan to rebuild. Yet the couple fear that those numbers may drop once homeowners have a clearer picture of how much insurance money is coming in. Scott worries that if his neighbors decide to sell, developers will build oversize spec houses, designed for quick sales to a broad pool of potential buyers rather than tailored to the needs of longtime residents displaced by the fire: “If it’s just a pure developer thing, you can do some really aggressively big stuff. People will really need to do the math around January.”
Angela nodded. Until she sees her neighbors—those who have pledged to stay—break ground on their new houses, she said, “I won’t feel confident.”
HEATHER FLOOD
Heather Flood and her husband, Josh Goldsmith, had lived in Altadena for just 18 months when the Eaton Fire consumed their 1922 English cottage on Highland Avenue, about a mile and a half southeast of the Urius. This was a part of Altadena, relatively distant from the San Gabriels, that hadn’t seemed to occupy an area of high fire danger—until it did. But the couple had no hesitation about whether to rebuild.
“I don’t think we’ve ever questioned it for more than five minutes,” Flood told me when we met in the downtown Los Angeles apartment, across the street from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, where she’s living with her husband while they plan their return. Part of her certainty had to do with how much she had come to feel at home on the block and in the neighborhood—and the fact that she and her husband had been married in the living room of the house not long after moving in. But there are other elements to their calculus.
“Financially, we have no option,” she said. “We have a mortgage; we’re fortunate that our insurance pays for this apartment. But that will run out. You’re incentivized to move quickly and to rebuild.”
Like Scott Uriu, Flood is already working on a design for the new house: “The goal is to get drawings to the city by the end of the summer. We’d love to start building in the new year, but I think that’s pretty optimistic.” To speed things along, and because of the demands of her Woodbury position, she has hired a local firm, Story Dimson Studio, to serve as architect of record. “They’ll do the drawings and navigate the city stuff,” she said.
Flood told me that she bristles a little at the expectation that her new house, and others in the fire zone, will be some kind of groundbreaking model of sustainability and fire resistance. Architecture schools like the one she leads tend to compete—and this is especially true in Los Angeles—to come across as more experimental and nimble than their rivals.
“It’s a touchy subject for me,” she said. “I think perhaps because I’m affected, and I see so many neighbors who are outside the architecture world impacted, I get very agitated if I feel that there’s a sense of pressure for all of us to be innovative.”
After all, she stressed, the basics of fire-resistant architecture are straightforward. For the new house, she said, “we’re looking at stone. We’re looking at metal. But really, if you eliminate eaves and you do dual-tempered glass, you’re in pretty darn good shape. And so I also want there to be a level of honesty: It doesn’t necessarily take avant-garde responses.”
She laughed. “I should cut my tongue out, being the dean of a school of architecture, for saying this!”
The emphasis, she said, should instead be on reforming urban-planning and regulatory policies at the macro level: “You need at least 70 percent of the homes to be resistant or it doesn’t really matter. So there’s the actual materiality of any one house, and then there’s the code and the regulatory environment that has to mandate these things in order to get a sort of herd immunity.”
Still, she is candid about how much she appreciates the chance to design a new house from the ground up. And in a way, thinking about what shape that house will take has allowed her to begin to process the experience of the fire more quickly than would have otherwise been the case—or at least has offered a welcome distraction.
“The trauma of loss faded pretty quickly,” she said. “Maybe that’s because I’m an architect, so you immediately start thinking of this as a project. We hated every bathroom in the house and never thought we’d be able to remodel. And now we get to start from scratch.”
MICHAEL MCDONALD
“It was an amazing little cabin, probably a hunting cabin originally,” Michael McDonald told me about the 1930s house on Altadena’s Highview Avenue that he and his wife, Alice Park, bought in 2013 and lost to the Eaton Fire. “We really appreciated it, but we never would have designed something like this. The fixtures in the master bathroom never worked right, the front gate always stuck, the kitchen was too small. And now we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
He paused. “It sounds terrible, I know, but I would say I miss the stuff in the house more than the house itself. Especially the books.”
They decided right away they wanted to return to Highview. Their reasons for doing so, though, suggest some of the complexity of the rebuilding process. What McDonald appreciated most about Altadena was the diversity of both the people and the architecture—“a real mix,” he said, making it the antithesis of a cookie-cutter suburb. “You would go from modernist to Tudor to Spanish colonial, right down the block.”
But maintaining that diversity of architecture is going to be difficult if large-scale developers buy up dozens of empty parcels and fill them with cost-effective, repeatable designs aimed at the lowest common denominator of architectural taste. The same is true when it comes to the racial makeup of Altadena. If the demographics of other high-priced neighborhoods in Los Angeles are any guide, the community is likely to grow less diverse postfire if housing costs soar.
Yet McDonald and Park, who is trained as an architect and became an interior designer, are plowing ahead, reasonably pointing out that they will have little control over those macro forces and focusing instead on bringing some life back to their own piece of land. They have already begun sketching plans for their new house, considering a range of rooflines, and have made a few fundamental decisions.
One is to harden the house in an unusual way, heeding lessons from the fire. “Our cabin did meet a lot of the strictest fire codes,” McDonald said. “[But] it didn’t make a difference with that firestorm! The winds were so extreme that they pushed a lot of the leaves and the debris right up against the house. Once those catch fire, it’s just like a trail. What we’re designing is a reaction to that.”
The new house, he said, will have a concrete slab that folds up on all four sides—“maybe to window height”—to protect the base of the house against fire. “And then it’ll be all noncombustible materials that surround the house.” The pitched roof will be metal, probably standing-seam, like the Urius’, or corten steel; the windows, like Flood and Goldsmith’s, will be dual-tempered. And like the Urius, McDonald and Park are considering oversize shutters that can completely cover the windows during a fire.
“We’re also paying attention to the direction the glazing faces,” he said, using the architectural term for windows. Because future fires are likely to approach Altadena from the east, as the Eaton Fire did, the house will have a limited number of windows on that side.
The major design decision they’re still weighing has to do with protecting the house against the noise and disturbance of nearby construction during the rebuilding phase ahead, which McDonald predicts will take 5 to 10 years. “I think an interior courtyard might work beautifully,” he said, holding up a small model showing a rectangular house with a cavity in the center. “It’d kind of be a more inward-facing project—as opposed to what it was before, looking out to the landscape.”
He echoed the comments from the other architects about the paradoxical excitement he feels about the process. “It’s tragic that we lost the house itself,” he said. “But [if] you give architects the chance to design a house, and they know there’s some money coming from somewhere, under any other circumstances they would raise their hand and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll take that on any day.’ And that’s how I feel.”
ALTADENA
Looking ahead, all three architects imagine an Altadena that regains a good deal of its vitality, even if developer-driven eyesores may crowd parts of the landscape. “I think we’re going to see the whole gamut,” McDonald told me. “We’re going to see amazing projects in Altadena that come out of the fire, and there are going to be some other ones that are maybe not so thoughtful.”
The Urius said that their typical attitudes about construction had been reversed. Angela, usually upbeat, was worried that the recovery process would continue to be unpredictable. Scott, normally the cynic, was feeling uncharacteristically optimistic, perhaps because he’d been able to channel his anxiety into a design project. “With all of these new houses, the architectural energy they will represent,” he said, “five years from now, Altadena is potentially going to be the coolest place in Los Angeles to live.” Many Altadenans, I can tell you, felt that it already was.
Flood is encouraged by the possibility that L.A. architects, so often separated by geographic, generational, or stylistic divides, will come together and treat the rebuilding as a collaborative project. “Everyone can take those siloed innovations and direct them toward the same goal,” she said. “That I find to be very exciting. What was it called, for the vaccine? Operation Warp Speed? This is Operation Warp Speed for architecture.”•
Christopher Hawthorne is a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a former longtime architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2018 to 2022, he served as chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, where he helped organize the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group and edited its 2021 report and recommendations, Past Due.
