Hasta La Ideas

The wildfires raging in Los Angeles are highlighting the underrated significance of the city’s unique urbanism and 20th-century architecture, writes Daniel Elsea.

This is a love letter to LA. In life, as in history, it takes a tragedy to appreciate something’s value. This is a lesson that as an Angeleno transplant in London, I’ve been reflecting on these last few days.

As of the latest count, 10,000 structures in my hometown have been destroyed. Each one special, whether a home, a shop, or school. Like LA at large, they hover under the radar of architectural history. These are day-to-day buildings like Altadena’s Theosophical Society or the cottages of Janes Village, destroyed by fire.

LA boasts the world’s most important legacy of 20th century architecture. There is the Japanese influence of the Austrian Rudolph Schindler in the 1920s house that bears his name in West Hollywood. There are the 1940s-50s Case Study Houses that dot many endangered neighbourhoods. In 1949, the designer couple Charles and Ray Eames completed the most emblematic of them in the Palisades on the northwest edge of Santa Monica.

It takes a tragedy to appreciate something’s value

Now a museum, the Eames House is one of the world’s priceless architectural treasures. Its visible structure and lofty living room inspired a generation of architects. It was evacuated last week; rare objects removed for safekeeping. Thankfully, it has so far been spared the devastation that has befallen many of its Palisades neighbours.

A particular delight is Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven, a stone’s throw away from Altadena. Here, there are hundreds of craftsman homes, many over 100 years old. Small by today’s Zillow-charged standards, they are nevertheless highly desirable. Pasadena is also home to The Gamble House, designed by architect brothers Greene and Greene for the family of Proctor & Gamble fame. The mansion was a refuge for the Midwestern magnates escaping the unseemly industrialisation back east.

In Malibu, there is the Getty Villa; it thankfully has been spared too. Opened in the early 1970s, it was a re-creation of an ancient Roman villa unearthed in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. As a late 20th century boy, my father would often take me there. It’s where an Angeleno might first encounter Europe. It remains a shrine of wonder in my mind.

Living in Europe today, I am sometimes told my hometown doesn’t have history. That it is rootless. Where is the heritage? Our Malibu villa might be a reproduction, but it houses one of the finest collections of Europe’s most ancient and prized possessions.

Safety is what gave birth to Los Angeles. The 20th-century world may have been on fire, but you could find refuge in LA. So, little nirvanas took root among other peoples’ oases. You could safeguard your treasures here between the sea and the mountains.

They came by the thousands, the millions. Armenians, Burmese, New Englanders, Jews, Iranians, Mexicans, Salvadorians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans, Filipinos, African-Americans and midwesterners. It didn’t take us long before we were all Angelenos.

I am sometimes told my hometown doesn’t have history

We pioneered the bungalow. We invented the drive thru. We crafted the strip mall. We built chateaux alongside temples. We sexed up main street. Yes, we embraced the automobile because we could. Our architecture is etched with this legacy.

In London, my now adopted home, the legacy of fire looms large. The Great Fire of 1666 burned down most of the Square Mile, the commercial core. In the aftermath of the destruction, the starchitect of the day, Christopher Wren, dreamed up a grand plan to rebuild. He imagined grand axes and wide boulevards. It was an ordered and orthogonal vision that would have erased the messy layout of medieval London. Fortunately, the plan was never realised.

The irregular streets, the tiny lanes, the totally incomprehensible grid (or absence of grid) stayed intact. Today, it remains not a city of grand gestures like Paris. Nor a city of straight avenues like New York. London stayed bent, quirky, tight. Post-fire, the intrinsic DNA remained. New buildings took the place where ones had burned. Instead of being timber framed, they were a bit taller, built of brick and stone.

The Great Fire of 1666 wouldn’t be London’s only major moment of destruction. Nearly 300 years later, it faced the Blitz. German bombardment destroyed so much of the same Square Mile. Again, the oddly shaped plots were left, like little leftovers, polygons of land so misshapen in the eyes of those used to the North American grid. The opposite of broad streets and big lots.

People like to think London is ancient, yet 50 per cent of these buildings were built since the second world war. The twin disasters of the 17th-century fire and the 20th-century world war has produced a 21st century city of skyscrapers cohabiting with medieval churches.

If a blind man from 14th century London who lived and breathed these streets were dropped into today’s milieu, he would still know his way around. Because the fabric remains. The streets are the same. The scale and sense of place lives on. London has stayed London.

Many LA neighbourhoods are more compact and characterful than a typical American suburb

The global stereotype of LA is that of a sprawling non-city. Yet many LA neighbourhoods are more compact and characterful than a typical American suburb. Many houses in Bungalow Heaven are around 1,000 square foot. The average size of a new home in the US at large is approaching 2,500 square foot.

The exurbia of the Sun Belt cities is crass by any comparison. So, we have in Los Angeles a series of precious moments of a city which had discovered the automobile but had not yet been overcome by it.

Built in the 1930s, the four-lane Pasadena Freeway is the world’s oldest highway. Today, it feels fragile in comparison to the brutal eight-lane tarmacs which dominate so much of the American landscape. In this early and mid-20th century LA, there is a pre-industrial spirit, albeit one borne in a wholly industrial world full of the possibility of mass prosperity.

Designers like the Eameses and Schindler saw in LA a landscape of bounty, but they didn’t overdo it. This is an LA to eulogize. In Spanish, our city’s mother tongue, the longform name of LA is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles”. A town built for a queen and her angels. ‘Tis the ring of a gentle paradise. The heart aches for it.

What of the process of rebuilding? The temptation will be to go full Wren and try something new, or to simply retreat away. To do either would be to betray the character of that Los Angeles, to forget the moment when its architecture has so far shined brightest. The craftsmanship, the polyglot design language, these are the things that make a rich architectural vernacular.

Let LA re-imagine these forms for a contemporary generation. And hopefully through this tragedy better appreciate what remains, and do more to protect it. May the world also now see Los Angeles for what it has long been – a precious cultural landscape.

Daniel Elsea is an urbanist and design journalist, and a partner at Allies and Morrison architecture studio in London.

The photo is by Jessica Christian via Unsplash.

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