Architects concerned by disjointed LA wildfires rebuild

Hasty rebuilding efforts following the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires are risking a repeat of the disaster, architects on the ground have warned. Dezeen US editor Ben Dreith reports.

Devastating fires shocked the US as they raged across Los Angeles and its surrounding areas for several days last January.

More than 16,000 structures – many timber-framed houses – were destroyed in the blazes, mainly in the Palisades and Altadena areas of LA.

With the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the fires becoming more common, future similar events are highly possible – but a year on, people involved in the recovery told Dezeen that the opportunity to make neighbourhoods more fire-resilient is being missed.

Owners of destroyed homes "not able to upgrade"

Responsibility for rebuilding is falling on individual homeowners who are usually reliant on their insurance providers to pay for the work, architect Zoltan Pali said.

But insurance company policies often require that replacement buildings match what was there before – even if they were vulnerable to fire.

"You're not able to upgrade because they are saying 'we are only required to give you back what was there'," said Pali.

Almost everyone Dezeen spoke with recognised insurance difficulties as the primary barrier to rebuilding.

Beyond the existing fire codes, which are extensive, the city has only issued recommendations for material choices, with the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety instructed under an executive order to provide "recommendations to promote fire-resistant construction materials".

This effectively means that selecting more fire-resistant materials is "voluntary", Pali added, and only an option for those able to afford it.

According to local architect Barbara Bestor, who is working on multiple projects in the area, skyrocketing material and construction costs, as well as the dominance of wood-oriented construction firms, are making it harder to rebuild more resilient homes.

"You have to build with whoever can build it for you, for what you can afford," she told Dezeen.

"And that's often not even an architect. That can be a construction company where you choose one of three designs. I don't know what's governing those choices and those projects."

After extensive detoxification efforts, the city and county have begun expediting permitting, with 1,236 building permits issued in LA County and 1,494 in the city of Los Angeles.

Large developers such as Thomas James Home, which completed the first rebuild late last year, have led the building effort, utilising executive orders to circumnavigate regulations. For instance, Executive Order One created waivers to bypass the strict California Environmental Quality Act.

Nevertheless, only a handful of replacement homes have been completed so far, according to reporting by ABC News.

"They're absolutely guaranteeing the next catastrophe"

To further speed up the process, LA County has made platforms where people can view and utilise pre-approved floor plans that have already been checked for zoning, and is even experimenting with AI to approve pending plan applications.

But ultimately, even with tax relief and charity support, the building efforts are being carried out individually or by developers, leaving architects uncertain as to what a reconstructed Los Angeles looks like.

"No one really knows what the landscape will look like when it's filled out again in a few more years," said Bestor.

Ken Calligar, who owns RSG-3D, a company that manufactures a concrete-based, fire-resilient building panel system, argues the current focus on building quickly is all but inviting another disaster.

"They're absolutely guaranteeing the next catastrophe," he told Dezeen.

"We have one of the greatest resiliency deficits of any industrialised country in the world, and it's been built this way by developers and contractors trying to make a quick buck for decades, and now we're paying the price."

On the other hand, several rebuilding initiatives have caught the attention of the architecture community, harkening back to California's experimental modernism.

Last year, two case study house initiatives were launched to create forward-thinking single-family homes, with one of the projects, Case Study: Adapt, beginning construction soon.

Elsewhere, Small Lots, Big Impacts is a pilot programme facilitated by UCLA CityLAB that seeks to address both resiliency and the housing crisis on city-owned land, partnering with developers to build designs gathered through a competition.

Within these projects, there is a focus on rethinking the material composition of the city, which is largely wooden.

There are examples of architects choosing to reject timber as a structural material. Pali is currently rebuilding a home in the Pacific Palisades using all brick for the structure, an unusual move for southern California.

Calligar said that his firm is working on more than 130 projects in the area, an exponential increase from late 2024.

The US Green Building Council, California, has released a study with recommendations on building that is both resilient and climate-friendly. It is also helping to organise a marketplace that would create a central place to buy resilient materials.

Other rebuild projects are experimenting with modular homebuilding techniques, as well as on-site robotic factories, or a more low-tech approach with adobe.

Bestor, who is working on Case Study: Adapt, said she is encouraging small design choices that can improve resilience.

Instead of full-scale structural changes, Bestor said that small "low-cost resiliency" moves are the most important that people looking to rebuild for resilience can make.

These design decisions include foregoing eaves, clipping rafters, and increasing setbacks in properties.

She also advocates for eliminating roof vents by using spray insulation, which she said can be key to avoiding catastrophic flashovers.

"The houses explode from the inside, that's the issue," she explained. "The embers get in, and then the house explodes."

Bestor is currently in construction on seven houses in the Palisades and two in Altadena. One house in the Palisades is wood-framed with plywood siding but incorporates fibreglass-faced gypsum board and will be clad with stucco, with a flat roof.

While the architecture community and organisations have sought to move the conversation forward with their recommendations and initiatives, some are asking if this individual approach to the rebuild is enough.

According to local architect Greg Kochanowski, innovative moves on "isolated buildings" may not be sufficient to address the problems facing Greater Los Angeles.

"Unfortunately, we have seen mostly isolated building proposals rather than systemic and holistic strategic thinking up to this point," he said.

"A resilient house that is disconnected from infrastructure planning, code pathways, and insurance recognition risks remaining symbolic rather than systemic."

The question of setbacks and defensible space – areas of landscaping that slow fire – has remained top-of-mind for people thinking at the block level, but little has been seen in the way of neighbourhood-wide or city planning, according to Kochanowski.

There are no current plans to introduce so-called "managed retreat" strategies or to consolidate land for defensible parks while densifying these historically suburban areas.

And no significant steps have been taken to retrofit existing communities in surrounding areas to protect them in the event of future wildfires.

Meanwhile, an executive order banning the division of single-family land parcels into multiple units through Accessory Dwelling Units in parts of the Palisades has cast doubt on whether adding density in the rebuilding process is likely, raising concerns that the spread of development into fire-prone areas will continue.

However, Kochanowski said that some recent initiatives, such as LA County's developing Community Wildfire Protection Ordinance, which seeks to amend the way that subdivisions are set up in high-risk areas, do bode well for future disasters.

"A tilt away from McMansions"

The architects we spoke with expressed hope in smaller levels of organisation. Several mentioned the potential for homeowner association-level organisation, with neighbours banding together to create shared landscaping elements, or community land trusts that would pool land to reconstitute neighbourhoods using preexisting property.

It is not yet clear whether the forward-thinking of architects will significantly impact the rebuilding process up against the need for immediate shelter – many people are running out of insurer-paid temporary housing credit – and developers and corporations, which continue to buy up land.

"There's a lot of idealism, but it does come up against the economics of construction loans," said Bestor.

As a possible upside, both Pali and Bestor noted a trend toward building smaller.

"The best big-picture thing right now is a tilt away from McMansions," said Bestor. "For actual people rebuilding their house, what do they really need?"

The top photo, taken in Pacific Palisades in summer 2025, is by Iwan Baan.

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