The Los Angeles wildfires hit this region’s design community hard.
If architects, designers and other related professionals weren’t victims personally, there was a strong chance that someone they’d worked for was or that a project they’d worked on had suffered dramatic fire damage, if not burning down entirely.
That professional community formed a network aimed at supporting both peers and clients, an effort that resulted in the Rebuild LA website, a tool to help fire victims better understand the resources available for rebuilding what they lost.
“There were so many buildings and houses lost,” Rachel Shillander, a licensed architect, artist and founder of the firm R. Shillander, said. All she could think was “Oh, my gosh, how are we going to do this?”
By “this,” Shillander meant rebuilding her native Los Angeles, a city with the rich architectural landscape that helped inspire her career. All told, the Eaton and Palisades wildfires burned about 11,000 single-family residences alone, with the damage totaling roughly $29.7 billion.
Building professionals were also getting bombarded with information — from clients, the city, the state, various trade associations — about policies and best practices following the tragedy. As the information flooded in, “we also had no idea what the next step and path forward was because [the disaster] was still actively unfolding.”
Out of her “extreme anxiety about the situation,” Shillander posted a story on her Instagram asking whether any people in the architecture, design, engineering and construction industry were interested in getting on a call to discuss next steps and available support networks.
“What I thought was going to be a handful of my friends turned into an almost 400-person call on Zoom,” Shillander said. All those people didn’t just include architects and construction professionals, they also encompassed land-use consultants, interior designers and at least one insurance specialist offering a wealth of knowledge about the LA area.
The meeting got the ball rolling on resource sharing and prompted Aaron Leshtz, co-founder of the local firm AAHA Studio, to set up a wide-reaching Slack channel that eased “cumbersome” information sharing among the collective.
“As of today, I think it’s like 650 people,” Leshtz said. The digital space allowed LA’s professionals to distribute “accurate information” among their peers, he said, also noting that in this kind of tragedy, “information spreads very quickly and misinformation spreads even more quickly.”
A resource homeowners could use over time
The organizers also wanted to make sure homeowners had the information they needed readily available as they sifted through the loss and began imagining what the next steps might look like.
“I felt like building something out that could reach more people would be helpful,” explained Sémone Kessler, an LA-native architect and founder of the local firm Matter Studio. Kessler, who does not have a professional background in coding but likes to build websites for fun, got to work creating something people could access easily and intuitively from their mobile phones in case they lost their desktop and laptop computers in the fires.
The resulting Rebuild LA website presents visitors with a five-step timeline for what rebuilding might look like, starting with addressing immediate needs and securing insurance money — Kessler’s father is an insurance professional — and ending with a move-in checklist. It’s difficult to know exactly which resources victims will need because “we’re essentially building this bike as we’re riding it,” Kessler said. “A lot of this is unfolding as we’re creating the website and … updating it weekly.”
Ideally, the website is a resource that rebuilders can use over time, and something that will help victims avoid the recovery scams that can crop up after a disaster. “We just wanted to arm people with the information they would need to navigate” the process, Kessler said.
Making sure people get 'good design for a reasonable price'
A number of firms have also committed to offering free consultations for wildfire victims, which has stretched the bandwidth of small, local studios used to dealing with just a handful of clients at a time.
Leshtz, who co-founded his firm alongside his wife, architect Harper Halprin, said his company has had initial consultation with upward of 40 wildfire victims interested in rebuilding. “It is a bit of a challenge,” he explained, because these conversations do not mean that AAHA is going to “get the job or that the job is right for us.”
The firm is a business, with employees to pay and families to provide for, but its team is giving what they can when they can, serving “as many people as possible” and while trying to uphold an ethos that “everybody deserves good design for a reasonable price.”
Kessler, who saw a number of projects she completed for clients in the Palisades burned to the ground, thinks architects can help ease some of the burden of wildfire victims who choose to rebuild.
“I think it’s our job to help lift their load a little bit and make this process easier for them,” she said. That can mean meeting with structural engineers to figure out which — if any — surviving project elements they can preserve to help trim costs so funds can meet what clients want and need.
“After going through this huge hardship, people want to feel excited to go back home,” Kessler said. “Sometimes that means investing a little bit more … so figuring out where we can save money so [clients] can spend it on the things they really want to."