Two Mid-Century Gems Stand in the Path of the L.A. Wildfires. Here’s the Latest
As four separate wildfires ravage L.A., spreading at dizzying speeds that resemble something of a post-apocalyptic disaster film, more than 30,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes with two reported deaths. Also at risk, however, are the city’s iconic historical landmarks and buildings that, if destroyed, would be a devastating loss to the L.A. community and design world at large. ELLE DECOR spoke with Adrian Scott Fine, the president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, who describes the current moment in L.A. as “a very surreal experience.”
“This is very much an evolving, minute-by-minute situation,” Fine explains. “People’s safety is our top priority, but at the moment, we’re trying to get a handle on what's at risk, what has been lost, and what measures are being taken to mitigate some of those impacts.”
It’s a frustrating wait-and-see situation at this point, Fine says. “After this fire is hopefully very soon contained, we will assess the damage, and bring in our resources to mitigate any additional losses.”
The Pacific Palisades, where one of the largest fires has raged, has a particularly storied history, one that dates back to the early 20th century as an epicenter of the midcentury modern architecture movement. Says Fine, “If you don't have that physical place, standing, where you can touch and feel and go into it, it's much less real. It’s a tremendous loss.”
What landmarks stand in the line of fire? Fine says the team is keeping a close eye on two properties, specifically: the Eames house and the Entenza house, two icons of midcentury modern architecture and part of the landmark Case Study House experiments.
The Case Study House program was the result of a design competition promoted by editor John Entenza for the January 1945 issue of Los Angeles-based Arts & Architecture magazine. The program, created to solve the problem of housing shortages amid an anticipated building boom following World War II, emphasized modern, affordable, easily built houses. The result was a crop of 20 homes—built by legendary designers including Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Ralph Rapson, Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, and Pierre Koenig—that forever changed American architecture. Nine of the Case Study Houses are in Los Angeles.
“We know at the moment that the Eames house [a National Historic Landmark] is still safe,” Fine says, adding that at the moment, L.A. Conservancy is trying to retain as much as possible, or move it out of harm's way.
"We are closely monitoring the situation and the Eames Foundation has taken every precaution to protect the site," the Eames Foundation wrote in an Instagram story. "Yesterday, the Foundation's team worked quickly to remove a small number of objects from the house before they had to evacuate the building."
Another significant landmark is the Getty Villa, a hillside compound built by its namesake billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty in 1954 and later opened as a museum in 1974. It houses more than 44,000 rare antiques dating from 6,500 BC to AD 400. Its location between the Pacific Ocean and a brutally dry, open hillside, has subjected its grounds to the blaze, though officials confirmed they were able to keep the flames at bay, with minimal damage to the property’s trees and vegetation.
“From everything that we've heard, the villa is currently on safe territory, even though there have been fires all along the grounds,” Fine says “People have taken preventative measures like cutting down brush so they can keep the fire from spreading again.”
The most important measure for protection against future blazes is knowledge, Fine says. “Thankfully in the city of L.A., they've done a survey of the entire city,” Fine explains. The Palisades region, for instance, was surveyed about 10 years ago, with continuing updates. The team identified 300 to 400 historic sites that they are now watching very closely as L.A. is ablaze.
For Fine, the loss of a historic landmark represents so much more than physical bricks and mortar: “It's the touchstone in telling the story of who we are, who we were before, how we’ve evolved, and who Angelenos are all about.”
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