Pain, hope (and romance!) in the year since the fires

Dear DnA friends,

I hope you have had a restful holiday and that 2026 has gotten off to a peaceful start, despite the turmoil courtesy of Team America!

Of course this week marks a painful anniversary. Wednesday, January 7th, is a year from the fateful day when ill winds blew through Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, destroying 31 lives and some 17,000 structures, uprooting thousands of people and leaving a cloud of toxins and gloom over LA for many months.

As the year kicks off, thousands await permits to start rebuilding or are still in limbo, figuring out what to do in the face of shattering costs and numerous challenges.

However, catastrophe often serves as a catalyst for creativity and renewal. This last year has seen an explosion of activity from the design and architecture community, as it stepped forward to offer help and ideas for building back better.

These include initiatives to reprise the architectural character of neighborhoods – through Case Study: Adapt, Case Study 2.0, Foothill Catalogue Foundation, New California Classics and many other design programs. There are multiple efforts to rationalize and speed up the production of housing, modeled most recently in a showcase of prefab homes created by cityLAB. There are conversations about using this moment to add more dwellings, commerce and public spaces on underutilized thoroughfares. Professional associations like SocalNOMA (National Organization of Minority Architects) have served as an ear and support to the deep-rooted Altadena Black community upended by disaster.

Image courtesy Gensler/C.W. Driver/Brecht Vanthof.

Calamity also also produced some unexpected upsides. For example, in my own backyard of Santa Monica, the forlorn downtown Santa Monica Place and 3rd Street Promenade saw a sudden burst of youthful life as Pali High-schoolers in need of a new home temporarily took over the defunct Sears building. Architecture critic Sam Lubell details the race to convert the structure by Gensler (with an assist from city planners) in his LA Times round-up of seven notable buildings for 2025. It stands as a model of slashing red tape, and creative adaptive reuse.

For one couple in Altadena, loss also delivered renewal. Charles and Lynnelle Bryant's longtime house and lush garden was burned to the ground. But they jumped into high gear, redesigning their own home, and that of some 26 neighbors, as well as working with SocalNOMA and their church to support other community members. They had expected 2025 to be the year they started to wind down their lives. Instead they found new purpose (and a romantic end to the year thanks to daughter Ebony and boyfriend Kinsey Green).

Moreover, their designs embody positive changes in residential lifestyle. For example, many clients are adding an ADU, enabling several generations to live together going forward. They also all asked for an architectural feature that used be the norm in houses in warm climates: the porch.

As Lynnelle Bryant explains in this report for KCRW, whereas earlier designs kept people inside with the air conditioning and heating, “we're seeing the boundaries being changed and the flow between outdoors and indoors to be so much more important for the sense of community.”

Read on for more creative responses to the anniversary as well as other Design Things To Do.

Lynnelle and Charles Bryant hold a rendering of their replacement house. Photo by Frances Anderton.

Design Things To Do

What Is A Memorial For?

Wednesday, January 7th, 2:00-4:30 PM

House Museum Chimney Yard, Pacific Palisades

Shuttle: 333 Los Liones Dr, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

In this thinkpiece about LA’s capacity to forget disasters, The Hollywood Reporter's Matthew Specktor writes that L.A. is “built on a series of amnesias.” He adds that he has “yet to see any public, tangible memorializing of the Eaton or Palisades fires.”

Well, one person who has embarked on realizing exactly that is Evan Curtis Charles Hall. His House Museum has spent the last year working to create a Palisades Fire Memorial made of six salvaged chimneys, some by notable architects, that survived the flames in otherwise immolated houses.

This Wednesday, Angelenos are invited for a commemorative gathering and fundraiser at the Chimney Yard in the Palisades, where one chimney stands and five others are temporarily in storage. Following a welcome from Palisades community leaders, Hall and a panel will discuss “the importance of memorialization and our collective role in the process of recovery.”

Limited Capacity – RSVP to info@house.museum

Image courtesy House Museum

From the Upper Valley in the Foothills: Various Artists

January 10th-31st, Opening: Saturday, January 10th, 4-7 PM

Marta, 3021 Rowena Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90039

“Trees, perhaps more than any other element of a landscape, embody the spirit of lived existence,” says Marta gallery in Silver Lake.

Marta has teamed up with Angel City Lumber, one of the rare local mills that collects and catalogs fallen trees, for use in commercial and community projects. They will mark the anniversary of the fires with a show of functional artworks made from unique pieces of timber by an impressive lineup of artists and furniture, including curator Vince Skelly, Ryan Belli, Brian Guido (Barni Goudi), Tristan Louis Marsh, Shin Okuda, Ellie Richards and many more.

Click here for details.

Stool by Vince Skelly; Image courtesy Marta

Rebuilding Our Community

Altadena Rebuild Expo

Saturday, January 10th, 10 AM-7:15 PM; After Party: 7-8:30 PM

409 Woodbury, Altadena, CA 91001

Drive through Altadena now and you will see some replacement houses briskly under construction. But for many homeowners, the job of rebuilding has barely begun. So January kicks off with Altadena Rebuild Expo, an all-day, community-driven event “guiding homeowners through every stage of rebuilding from first questions to move-in, from planning and permits to design, construction, and resilient materials.”

Expect presentations from county agencies, licensed professionals, and design-build experts. Speakers include Charles and Lynnelle Bryant, featured above.

Click here for details.

Newly built homes sit alongside empty sites in Altadena. Photo by Frances Anderton

Design Against Racism

Lore Leimert Park

4334 Degnan Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90008

Friday, January 9th, 6-8 PM

Harun Grand Opening

Friday, January 9th

4336 Degnan Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90008

Side by side on Degnan Boulevard in downtown Leimert Park are three young businesses that should be catnip to anyone interested in culture and design: Lore Leimert Park, a bookstore founded by Untitled Love creator Dário Solari. Its rich cherrywood shelves contain art and design, theory and political writings devoted to “cultivating community through critical design philosophy.” A long communal table and kids corners enhance the sense of togetherness.

Next door is Harun, two storefronts containing a boutique coffee bar connected by a hidden door (made of hinged shelves) to a seductive haven for performance and talks. The first is mustard yellow, the second washed from carpeted floor to ceiling in maroon.

These two enterprises received co-investment from Prophet Walker, co-creator of Treehouse coliving buildings, who is now deeply engaged with the Leimert Park area.

This Friday, Harun holds its official opening, and Lore Leimert Park hosts a conversation, led by Walker, on architecture, planning and “Design Against Racism,” the topic and title of a new book in store by Omari Souza. Souza and I will join Walker for the conversation.

Click here for details.

Image by Taiyo Watanabe, courtesy Lore Leimert Park

Defending Ethical Integrity: The New Degenerate Art

January 10th-February 21th; Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 6-9 PM

Torrance Art Museum, 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance CA 90503

No one wields a pencil with quite the power of my friend Laurie Lipton, artist of large artworks made of millions of tiny pencil strokes that savage consumer culture. Now “POST TRUTH,” below, an 8x9-foot drawing, joins a lineup of artists including AMBOS Project, Ken Gonzales-Day, Narsiso Martinez, Steven Wolkoff and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot at Defending Ethical Integrity: The New Degenerate Art, opening this Saturday at Torrance Art Museum.

Invoking the Nazi Party’s infamous 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, Defending Ethical Integrity (D.E.I.) “stands as both a rebellion and a celebration of fearless self-expression,” say organizers.

Click here for details.

Image courtesy Laurie Lipton.

Tools of the Trades: American Handmade Implements & Devices

Craft in America Center in Los Angeles

Through February 28th

8415 West Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048

For every action, there is a reaction. As AI and rapid automation sweep forward, a community of makers remains committed, not merely to handcraft, but also making the tools for their crafts, “deftly manipulating plain steel and wood into exquisite devices, often sourcing materials hyper locally or from scrap,” says the team at Craft in America Center.

Check out this exhibition of tools so beautiful they are an item of functional art in themselves, created by a range of artisans including Tom Latané, maker of the hacksaws, below.

Click here for details.

Image courtesy Craft in America Center.

Cardboard: Infinite Possibilities

Through January 30th
Artist talk: Thursday, January 15th, 7-9 PM
Closing reception: Friday, January 30th, 5-9 PM

Wönzimer Gallery, 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031

On seeing Frank Gehry’s cardboard furniture some 35 years ago, artist Ann Weber was transfixed, and since then devoted herself to creating large amoebic sculptures out of discarded boxes. She’s also kept tabs on other artists working with cardboard and has curated a newly opened, group show for Wönzimer Gallery, featuring 13 artists who, she says, “redefine what is possible with this humble material.”

Weber says that sustainability and reinvention are central themes throughout the show, modeled most prominently in Shigeru Ban’s rapid-response shelters made of cardboard sonotubes for communities affected by natural disasters.

Click here for details about the show and here for the artist talk.

Image courtesy Ann Weber/Wönzimer Gallery

What I'm Digging

Team America!

When I woke up this past Saturday morning to the news out of Venezuela, the first thing that came into my head was the anthem from Team America: World Police (“America... F*** Yeah!”). So hubby and I rewatched the 2004 classic by the South Park team, released a year into the Iraq War. It is of its time but still an artful (with "Supermarionation" inspired by The Thunderbirds) and beyond outrageous, take-no-prisoners documentary, er, I mean satire, about U.S. "peace"-keeping overseas.

Image courtesy Team America: World Police

Top to Toe

Rama Duwaji's mostly-black, offbeat outfits, reminiscent of SCI-Arc faculty dress code, certainly make for intriguing branding for the spouse of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ran on "affordability" and connection to “real” New Yorkers. But Duwaji indisputably has amazing style. And much of it ends at her feet in bespoke boots and shoes (reportedly loaned or reused, not bought at bespoke boot prices.) She also models a stylistic counterpoint to techies, who are reportedly encouraged to wear slippers at work! In fact, both Mamdanis appear very well-shod. Could the charismatic duo bring about a revolution in workplace footwear?

Rama Duwaji, photographed for The Cut

“Born to Rewild”

Among those who might see their lives improved in 2026 are LA area mountain lions. Their habitat has been riven for decades by freeways, and the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills, scheduled to open later this year, is designed to reconnect it. This is just one example of “deep ecology,” explored in Born To Rewild, an article by Yours Truly for BuildingGreen. I loved researching the buildings, infrastructure and public spaces that are designed to bring humans, animals and plant life into balance with each other. Talents who appear in the story include the teams at Terremoto, CarbonShack, ORA, Loescher Meachem Architects, Gabrielino Tongva Springs Foundation as well as inspiring urban ecologist Kat Superfisky. As Superfisky points out, despite humans’ best efforts at omnipotence, “nature always bats last.”

Subscribe to BuildingGreen, or read the story in PDF form here.

Screenshot 2026-01-06 at 12.49.23 PM Image courtesy 101wildlifecrossing.org

Well, that's it for this week. As always, thank you so much for reading this newsletter. Reach out to me with comments or news at francesanderton@gmail.com.

Yours,
Frances