「经济学人」Cinder blocks

How will it rebuild?

Luisa Fabbri looked like an apparition as she walked down a deserted tree-lined avenue in Altadena, the blackened remains of buildings on either side of her, power lines on the pavement and smoke in the air. She carried a pillow in one hand and a satchel of tax documents in the other. She had evaded a National Guard cordon to retrieve them.

Her house miraculously survived the devastation wreaked by fires in Altadena, 14 miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles. But she mourned anyway. Her home is part of one of the first Modernist housing developments in America, built for working-class residents by Gregory Ain, an architect, in the 1940s. Now all but a few of the 28 houses have burned to the ground.

Fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades have damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 buildings, many of them homes. That includes oceanfront residences of film stars between Pacific Palisades and Malibu. But the blaze has also engulfed Modernist gems, some built in the mid-20th century, when a group of architects designed small, affordable houses made of easy-to-assemble materials, with open-floor plans and large windows that drew the faintest line between indoors and outdoors. At the time Los Angeles had few building regulations, so the city was a playground for experimentation. The ethos spread across America.

The most famous of these, the Case Study Houses, designed by architects including Charles and Ray Eames and Richard Neutra, appear to have survived the infernos, says Adrian Scott Fine of Los Angeles Conservancy, a heritage organisation. Ain’s Park Planned Homes were not so lucky. Nor were later (more upmarket) Modernist icons, such as Ray Kappe’s Keeler House, completed in 1991. Particularly heartbreaking, says Mr Scott Fine, was the loss of the ranch house designed in the 1920s for Will Rogers, an actor, in the state park that bears his name.

Ain was a social activist. He was inspired by Californian “starchitects” such as Rudolph Schindler and Neutra, both of whom had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright. He lost commissions in the McCarthy era (including for the Case Study House programme), but his social conscience defined his work. The original owners of some of his homes in Altadena were black Americans; Ms Fabbri bought her house from Martin Luther King’s lawyer. The development was built like a park, with lush landscaping, interior courtyards and side-facing garages. It remained a multiracial, free-spirited place.

Architects today still sympathise with the social concerns of their time. Amid a homelessness crisis, LA needs more low-cost housing. But it may not be feasible, nor desirable, to replicate the style of lost buildings. Construction codes have changed; costs will be prohibitive; and the risk of natural disasters is rising. “What is the point of having a simulacrum when it doesn’t meet the requirements of how we live today?” says Sarah Lorenzen, professor of architecture at Cal Poly Pomona.

For her part, Ms Fabbri, an Italian, hopes that her neighbourhood will rise from the ashes, however the next iteration of homes looks. “I’m a dreamer,” she says. “That’s why I live in America, I guess.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Cinder blocks ”(Jan 16th 2025)

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