In his 1995 essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” the urban theorist Mike Davis saw a righteousness in Malibu’s destruction, arguing that its residents were exotic birds who cared nothing for the plight of ordinary citizens. Why should the state of California protect one’s selfish choice of living in a paradise plagued by fires?
Despite the obvious Schadenfreude, Davis missed the point.
As Angelenos far beyond the canyons of Malibu watched swaths of their city burn this week, those exotic birds suddenly seemed rather common. We all started to feel like canaries in a coal mine.
For more than a century, Los Angeles has entertained the world by broadcasting its own vision of the future. This week, we’re showcasing exactly what a future of climate change will look like. And it’s not just a few brush fires originating in the wilderness—this time, the flames are raging through suburban and urban neighborhoods. When 16 million Californians are under red-flag warnings, nobody feels safe. But we can change that—if we dramatically alter how we design and build.
On Tuesday, I received an urgent call to evacuate my son from his middle school, in Pacific Palisades. (Some buildings were destroyed, but others are still standing.) The plumes of smoke in the Santa Monica Mountains elicited a familiar and deeply unsettling feeling. In Los Angeles, we’ve seen this before. The smell of burning chaparral took me back to my childhood in the mountains of western Malibu, where it wasn’t unusual to evacuate to parking lots on the beach—or welcome evacuees into our home.
This week, we’re showcasing exactly what climate change will look like.
In 1988, my parents moved there from floundering Detroit due to a transfer by the architectural firm that employed my father. My mother, a musician, would eventually sing with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, but she was also an elementary-school music teacher and voice coach, clipping coupons to make ends meet.
After saving for years, my parents scraped together enough money to buy a small piece of land in a remote area of Malibu and built a house that my dad designed. They finished and painted it themselves, and still live there today, thanks in no small part to Kristin Crowley, the current Los Angeles fire chief. During the 2018 Woolsey Fire, she and her partner, Hollyn Bullock, personally saved the house using garden hoses. (They were off duty at the time.)
Three decades later, after starting my own firm, I was finally able to create my first architectural vision of life on the Pacific coast by designing Horizon House. It was a labor of love—not only for Malibu’s environment and its people but also for my family. My clients were my brother, the concert pianist Andrew von Oeyen, and his partner, Emmanuel Villaume, an opera conductor.
I spent five years on Horizon House, and its design helped me to win the League Prize, awarded by the Architectural League of New York, and was the basis for a MacDowell Fellowship. Yet when it was first introduced to the world, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on December 3, 2018, it was done entirely without my knowledge or consent. Thanks to a talented structural engineer, it was still standing, but only as a ravaged ruin. Just two weeks after the owners received their homeowners’ insurance, the Woolsey Fire raced down Decker Canyon and consumed the neighborhood; there were no firefighters in sight. Horizon House became a symbol of the area’s destruction.
Rebuilding took another five years—in part, because Los Angeles County revised its planning requirements to ensure fire-truck access.
In the spring of 2023, I exhibited the project again, this time as Horizon House 2, at the Venice Biennale. But I had made some tweaks. The new version featured fewer eaves and no attics (which are known for trapping embers) as well as unventilated spray-foam-insulated roofs and concrete retaining walls. A fire-suppression system included sprinklers placed on the roof and within the landscape that could draw water from the pool. (Often, the municipal water supply runs out during prolonged wildfires, and electricity is frequently the first thing to go, so I included a generator enclosed in concrete to power the pumps.)
The Woolsey Fire raced down Decker Canyon and consumed the neighborhood. Horizon House became a symbol of the area’s destruction.
As of press time, the house is still standing. I check the Cal Fire maps hourly to monitor the progress of the Palisades Fire and the smaller ones that continue to crop up. At the risk of tempting fate, I’m confident that all of these adaptations will protect Horizon House 2—it was expressly designed for this sort of thing.
In the aftermath of this catastrophe, as we envision a new future for Los Angeles, we need to go much further than sprinklers. We should start by revisiting the past. The region’s first residents—the indigenous Chumash and Gabrielino/Tongva peoples, among other groups—understood that fire was not only predictable but essential. When they lived here in the 18th century, they too settled in the flatlands, among the mountains, and along the coast, just as we do today. They had a symbiotic relationship with the land, proactively burning and regenerating, going far beyond the efforts orchestrated by the Los Angeles Fire Department. It was a large-scale, systematic, thoughtful tradition that would ensure safety and sustenance.
What was especially remarkable about the Palisades and Eaton Fires is how seamlessly they spread from house to house. In the era of climate change, where the Santa Ana winds now rage into January (and beyond) at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, the challenge we face is no longer confined to an oversimplified idea of the wildland-urban interface, where the wilderness meets someone’s backyard. These building-to-building fires, which generate tremendous amounts of heat and spread very quickly, pose the greatest threat to human life.
Architects, homeowners, and city planners alike should urgently pursue a paradigm shift. It’s not sufficient to slap on fire-resistant exteriors or simply weed-whack the backyard—we must fundamentally revise how we design structures, landscapes, and urban developments.
Much of America was, and is, built quickly and cheaply, using stick-frame construction—two-by-fours and plywood. We’ve created a vicious cycle. Housing has become increasingly unaffordable, and there is limited incentive for builders to use high-quality, durable materials.
But we’re not starting from scratch. In my academic research, I’ve encountered many encouraging innovations in pre-fabricated modular construction, composite materials, and 3D printing that could contribute to more sustainable and resilient buildings.
And as we contemplate the charred remains of the Pacific Palisades, we should also think differently about what those neighborhoods could look like. There are plenty of prescient ideas on that front as well—just ask my U.S.C. colleague Lawrence Scarpa and his partners Angela Brooks and Jeffrey Huber, who have already envisioned innovative ways to develop coastal cities that can accommodate rising sea levels.
The architects Christopher Wren and Daniel Burham helped to transform London and Chicago, respectively, after devastating fires in previous centuries. In doing so, each reimagined what buildings and cities could be. It is time for Los Angeles to show the world a new vision for the future, transmitting a message of resilience and hope rather than destruction and despair. That’s what I’ll be telling my students when classes start again on Monday.
Geoffrey von Oeyen, a Los Angeles–based architect, is an associate professor of practice at the University of Southern California
