In this newsletter:

• Feature: Picking a beautiful home off a shelf to speed up fire rebuilding
• Crosswalk outlaw Jonathan Hale speaks
• How to get some bang from your buck during Dine LA week
• The Palisades chimney “tombstones” memorial
• Organic is best, right? Meet the farmer who thinks otherwise
• LA Metro Ambassadors make trains better

A Mid-century Modern Approach to Fire Recovery
by Brandon R. Reynolds

In 1945, the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, John Entenza, started an experiment. LA needed homes for soldiers returning from World War II, and Entenza’s idea was to enlist hotshot architects to design homes that could be built quickly and inexpensively, with what were at the time new, low-cost materials. That project was called the Case Study House program, and it resulted in 25 homes in LA by architects like Schindler, Neutra, and Eames. 

Back then, the impetus for building quickly was to address the rise of the middle class. Now, the impetus is to rebuild communities destroyed in the fires a year ago. 

And so, with thousands of homeowners desperate to design, permit, and build homes, some architects and builders have looked to the Case Study program as a model for speeding things up. A few of them have started projects to once again get hotshot architects to create house designs that homeowners can just pull off the shelf, saving everybody months of back-and-forth.

That’s the idea behind Case Study 2.0, a project started by brothers Steven and Jason Somers of Crest Real Estate.

“We wanted to take a lot of that forward-thinking mentality that was a core tenet of the original Case Study houses program, and try to adapt it to the problems of today, where we're trying to rebuild thousands of houses,” says Steven Somers. “But people don't necessarily just want to rebuild what is the fastest or just the least expensive. People also want something that is beautiful.”

One of the designs, by Portland’s William / Kaven Architecture …
 

… nods to one of the OG Case Study projects, the Stahl House.

The Somerses asked dozens of high-end architects to design houses, pro bono, that homeowners could choose from. They’ve got a catalog of 74 homes so far. 

Another, similar project, Case Study-Adapt, is a nonprofit in partnership with the Eames Foundation. Most of those houses are mid-century modern. A third, focused on Altadena, is called The Foothill Catalog, and includes modern as well as Spanish and craftsman style homes. 

Steven and Jason Somers stand in front of the lot that will soon be the first Case Study 2.0 house to break ground, possibly in January. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds/KCRW

Now the first Case Study 2.0 house is about to break ground, designed by San Francisco’s Richard Beard Architects for Deborah and Doug Hafford. 

Designs for the Haffords’ new home from Richard Beard Architects.

The Haffords had lived in the Palisades for 35 years when the fires destroyed their 1941 bungalow and most of the other houses on their street. They’re retired, their kids are grown, and as they told me on a call from Idaho, they knew they wanted to get back ASAP.

“Right from the get-go, I think we were pretty convinced that we wanted to stay there,” says Doug Hafford. 

“We definitely wanted this kind of mid-century modern vibe, right? And we wanted big open spaces and high ceilings and as much air and light as possible,” adds Deborah Hafford.

With any luck, they’ll be in their new home by the end of the year, pioneers in a pioneering project inspired by a time 80 years ago, when people, then as now, just wanted to come home.

In The Neighborhood

• Who knew you could be arrested for promoting road safety? The founder of People’s Vision Zero, an activist group pushing for safer streets in Los Angeles, spoke to Press Play’s Madeline Brand about his arrest for painting an unauthorized crosswalk on a residential street in Westwood. Why did he do it? Jonathan Hale had this to say: “Either you’ve been hit by a car, lost a loved one, or experienced the oppression of a car-dependent society. The smog. The traffic.” His group is pressuring the city to do a better job implementing Vision Zero, LA’s plan to end traffic deaths. In the meantime, Hale isn’t afraid to take matters into his own hands. And this week the city dropped its criminal case against him.
  
• Good Food host Evan Kleiman tells Madeleine Brand she approaches twice-a-year restaurant deals offered during Dine LA on a neighborhood basis. Start where you are. Find a local place to eat, in person, and bring a friend. The first Dine LA week of the year will run from January 23rd to February 6th, so get eating.
  
• As tens of thousands of homes burned during last year’s LA fires, there was a catastrophic irony: a whole lot of fireplaces, chimneys, and fireboxes survived. Soon, some of those chimneys will serve the purpose of remembrance and memorial. House Museum director Evan Curtis Charles Hall took KCRW host Steve Chiotakis on a tour of the half-dozen chimneys he has assembled so far. “I think a lot of us had this experience where we could see these chimneys standing as beacons, but also as tombstones for where the homes used to be," Hall says.
• Is the state making it too hard for organic farmers? Good Food’s Gillian Ferguson talked to Jason Cheng from Yao Cheng Farms, who decided after 17 years not to renew his organic certification. The farm isn’t changing any of its growing practices. Just cutting out the red tape. “We were at a point where we were doing more on the paperwork end instead of actually doing the farmwork itself,” Cheng says. “We would have to do paperwork through the night and then not be able to supervise our workers. We didn’t want the quality to dip.”
• Not all heroes wear capes; some of them wear lime-green vests. LA Metro’s transit ambassador program unleashed hundreds of helpers onto its buses and trains starting in 2022. And according to a recent UCLA study, riders dig it. Lead researcher Jacob Wasserman talked to Morning Edition host Danielle Chiriguayo about the improved safety the transit ambassadors have brought to the system: “Day to day, these are roles having eyes on the system, helping people navigate TAP cards, tell you which train to go to, and deterring crime and anti-social behavior simply by being there, even if they don't have enforcement power.”
  
 

Local Meme of the Week

KCRW's Local Letterbox

• 5 Things to Do This Week – Jazz is for everyone; Pokemon night at Benny Boy Brewing; treat your dog to a botanical garden stroll.

• Art Insider with Carolina Miranda — Over the course of February 2024, graffiti artists descended on the Oceanwide Plaza, turning it into a fame wall that extended over three towers standing at 25 stories or more. LA artist Sayre Gomez — once a graffiti artist himself — has now recreated the entire Oceanwide complex as a sculpture, and the detail is staggering.

• Design & Architecture with Frances Anderton — An upcoming competition encourages more home-building: Frame the Future! LA’s Housing Manifesto + Poster Showdown is an open competition and public exhibition that calls on creatives to use “powerful visual and verbal messaging to boldly make the case for a new residential dream for the Southland.” 

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