Heritage and conservation after the fires: what’s next for Los Angeles?

How do we steward the past into the future? As a conservationist and director of the graduate programs in heritage conservation at USC School of Architecture, the question is often on the mind of Trudi Sandmeier. A few weeks after the fires in Los Angeles indiscriminately engulfed neighbourhoods in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, it’s become an important and regular refrain. The fires destroyed individual structures, some designated as historically or architecturally important, and tore a rent in the cultural fabric of the city. In their aftermath, the ways that we give meaning to the buildings and places around us have changed.

The Palisades Fire ravaged Sandmeier’s home, leaving just the foundations. As she grieves that tremendous loss, she’s also working to understand her own role in guiding Los Angeles forward. 'As heritage conservationists, we are storytellers,' she says. 'We have skills that are needed at a time of crisis to help people—to help ourselves—understand both what we’ve lost and, more importantly, what remains.'

After the fires: the future of heritage and conservation in Los Angeles

Sandmeier was out of town when the Palisades Fire ignited. By the time her flight from Boston landed at LAX the next morning her family home and the historic, 31-room ranch house at the Will Rogers State Park were smouldering ruins. The two are deeply interconnected for Sandmeier, personally and professionally. Her grandparents worked for Will Rogers and lived on the ranch before building their own home nearby in the early 1930s. Her grandfather designed and built the house—digging a cellar by hand and planting persimmon trees and camelia bushes in the garden.

Although Rogers died in 1935 and his estate became a California State Park in 1944, Sandmeier’s grandfather continued to help caretake the ranch and its legacy. His stewardship lives on in Sandmeier, who co-founded the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the ongoing restoration and preservation of the park, where she still serves as a board member. She recently visited the ranch to survey the damage. While it’s been widely reported that the main house and the stables burned, some things survived the conflagration: oak trees, trails, fences, and outbuildings. All of these are part of the park’s heritage. 'The polo field looks perfect,' she notes.

Still, how and what to reconstruct is a discussion still on the horizon while Sandmeier and the foundation tackle the pressing needs facing the staff, docents, and board members who lost a place to live. 'These are places with meaning and community, with stories and memories that don’t get erased because there’s a fire,' says Sandimeier.

The Pacific Palisades holds a history that sometimes gets left out of a media narrative that categorises it chiefly as a neighbourhood of rich people’s mansions. Those exist, of course, but so do others, like the iconic modernist architecture masterpiece that is the Eames House, which amazingly survived the blaze. As did the modernist residence on San Remo Drive designed by J.D. Davidson, where writer Thomas Mann and his family lived in exile from 1942 until 1952 and is now a residency centre owned by the Federal Republic of Germany. It is just one of several homes dotting the winding Palisades streets that capture the cultural legacies of German-speaking and European émigrés in Los Angeles.

During the fires, residency fellows and staff evacuated the Thomas Mann House and nearby Villa Aurora, the former home of exiled German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta. 'Our team was only able to take a few selected items that would fit the trunk of their cars and had to leave lots of other things,' recalls Benno Herz, program director of the Thomas Mann House. 'Luckily, after the immediate danger of the first two or three days was over, we were able to actually retrieve some of the smaller artworks and historical artefacts from the house and safely store them at the Wende Museum in Culver City.' His relief that the house was spared damage (pending a toxicology report) is palpable.

And yet others weren’t so fortunate. The Thomas Mann House is part of the newly formed Pacific Palisades Preservation Coalition (PPPC), a new group formed by Palisades-native Brigitte Nicole Grice, co-founder of Chez Max et Dorothea, a gallery and residency program in France that upholds the surrealist visions of Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.

Among the coalition’s goals listed in a March release is an aim to fortify 'the community’s historical identity in the face of modern challenges, including climate change and recurring wildfire risks' and develop 'preservation guidelines that incorporate fire-safe and climate-resilient practices.'

The highlighting of climate emergency as a critical condition for preservation might seem like a shift away from a more precious understanding of architectural heritage. However, the careful restoration of historic structures is only one aspect of the field. Adaptation and resiliency increasingly are part of the conversation. 'How do we ensure that these places have a greater chance of survival?' asks Adrian Scott Fine, Los Angeles Conservancy’s president and CEO. He’s talked to aligned organisations in Sarasota, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina impacted by hurricanes. These are places, like Los Angeles, where whole communities face natural disasters. Gone are the days of thinking only about individual buildings. The scope is so much greater.

Extreme weather events, sea level rise, changing heat zones, and wildfires are the present reality and are dramatically affecting everything, including conservation, a field so often associated with the past. In spite of her grief and loss, Sandmeier finds optimism in the next generation of practitioners she teaches at USC. 'These are the folks who are going to be leading us into this future,' she says. 'They’re going to have to come up with the answers. So, having these conversations now is imperative. The fires bring climate change home in a tangible way.'