Designing for Disaster

“Think of mountains, our spinal cords, our heads—the oldest architecture in the world—they’re all strong because of compression,” says Michelle Toland, a volunteer for the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (CalEarth), raising her hands above her head to mimic a mountain.

Sunlight streamed through an oculus, illuminating the faces of 20 attendees gathered inside a 25-foot-high dome in Hesperia, California, on April 5. They were there to learn about SuperAdobe, a building method conceived in 1984 that has gained interest since the January fires in Los Angeles County.

Rebuilding efforts have begun taking shape, drawing some Angelenos two and a half hours northeast to Hesperia in search of ways to build back smarter and stronger. In LA, conversations about zoning, construction materials, and landscaping are also weaving through living rooms and town halls. And our homes, facing the threat of future fires, might end up looking radically different from the ones we know now.

An ancient, open secret

“It’s interesting, whenever there is a natural disaster or war around the world, people reach out to us to support them,” says Dastan Khalili, president of CalEarth and son of Nader Khalili (1936–2008), the Iranian-American architect, author, and innovator of the SuperAdobe construction system. Nader first presented SuperAdobe at a 1984 NASA symposium about building on the moon.

The walls of CalEarth’s aforementioned Strawbale Dome were mostly constructed using SuperAdobe, long sandbags filled with earth and compressed, then stacked with barbed wire between each layer, and straw bales finished with stucco. A straw bale roof crowns the dome. This fireproof structure is part of CalEarth’s village, which has about 20 domed buildings. Among them is a 2,300-square-foot home, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two-car garage—all made with SuperAdobe.

You might ask, why domes? Domes are arches rotated 360 degrees around a central vertical axis, and arches are revolutionary for their pressure distribution. They also help with seismic resistance. CalEarth has conducted rigorous seismic testing of its construction system, but the nonprofit educational institute and charity lacks the funding for official certification. Despite this, they have compelling anecdotes: a Nepal orphanage built with SuperAdobe withstood a 7.8 earthquake and 7.3 aftershock that leveled villages in the entire region. Student-built SuperAdobe structures survived Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria, and in January, a SuperAdobe home withstood the Eaton Fire on a street where everything else burned down—an event that received attention on social media.

Dastan believes that everyone should be able to build a home with their bare hands, and CalEarth often offers workshops and apprenticeship programs to show how. Their methods are open source and public domain. “The most abundant material in the world is under your feet,” Dastan says, adding that people originally built with earth—and still can. In fact, a 2022 Getty story about earthen architecture noted that the United Nations estimates that 30 percent of the world’s population lives in houses made of earth, which remains a prevalent building material in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

SuperAdobe isn’t the only technique that has entered the #RebuildBetterLA chat. Pacific Palisades resident and herbalist Marysia Miernowska started a Change.org petition calling for the use of cob, an ancient building material made from mixing clay, sand, straw, and water, in rebuilding post-fire. She and others like Sasha Rabin, who teaches natural building methods in Quail Springs, California, also champion the use of adobe, SuperAdobe, straw bale, and rammed earth.

And because natural materials aren’t expected to contain toxic chemicals that enter the air when a home burns down, these solutions could mitigate air quality issues, another challenging reality for LA since the fires.

Contemporary fire-resistant design in action

A BBC News TikTok video of the Pacific Palisades home of architect Michael Kovac and his wife, Karina Maher, has garnered 2.6 million views. When the LA fires raged in January, their house was the only one on its block to survive. This resilience was no accident. Back in 2007, the couple took apart their 1950s residence and donated its materials to Habitat for Humanity. Then they designed a new house with the twin goals of sustainability and fire resistance. Their efforts paid off—the home became one of the first LEED Platinum residences in California, using Eco-Cem fiber cement cladding; concrete-filled, cement plaster–clad retaining walls—“They look like Styrofoam Lego blocks,” says Kovac—and a planted roof (a roof covered in vegetation, which creates a fire-resistant layer through moisture). The roof also has a soil and volcanic rock mix, which protects against embers and direct flames.

Kovac and architect Thomas Schneider, of the multidisciplinary practice KOVAC, recently completed another fire-resistant residence: the Strata House in Bel-Air. This project was built around a structure that had been erected on the ashes of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s former home, which burned down in the 1961 Bel-Air Fire. Kovac recalls the iconic LIFE magazine photo of Gabor looking for her diamonds in the rubble, a reminder that everyone is susceptible to wildfire impact.

While KOVAC is known for high-caliber, bespoke projects—from luxury homes to a skate and BMX pumptrack in Inglewood—the firm has gotten a lot of calls about fire-resistant design since the recent conflagration. “To help, Thomas and I decided to create a sub-brand called KS-2, in order to offer people a custom-designed home at a fraction of our normal fee,” says Kovac.

Kovac and Schneider hope rebuilding efforts will prioritize responsibility. “We’d rather people not use wood at all,” says Kovac. “But you can get pretreated wood that has a one-hour fire rating and is not terrible.” They praise the city’s new wildfire code, which requires Class A roofs, dual-glazed windows, and vent protection. “Embers will get into plumbing and kitchen exhaust vents, all sorts of entry points, unless they’re protected by a mesh that has no bigger than an eighth of an inch opening,” says Kovac.

Equally important are the yards surrounding our homes. A popular term right now is “hardening the home,” or creating a fire defense system through exterior landscaping. Kovac stresses the importance of managing a defensible space: “The last thing you want to do is build a house that you think is robust, but you have a wood play structure right next to it, or a stack of firewood, which would become fuel for a fire.”

How “Yes in My Backyard” could help the resilience effort

On February 12, Cerca Homes welcomed Angelenos into their Mid-City showroom and office to present ideas about rebuilding smarter. Cerca personnel circulated in the room, educating architects, real estate agents, and developers about their journey from building prefab sheds to creating fire-resistant ADUs (accessory dwelling units, or guesthouses) and homes—up to 2,100 square feet—fabricated with steel frames.

Presenter Seth Phillips, a real estate agent who specializes in ADUs, said that over 70 percent of residential land in the United States is zoned R1, meaning it is designated for single family residences only. “The solution?” he asked the attendees. “Increase the density!” He referenced people who commute four hours a day from Palmdale to LA and praised the growing, pro-density YIMBY movement (Yes in My Backyard). Phillips was particularly energized about California’s Senate Bill 10, which lets local governments rezone parcels to allow up to 10 housing units per lot, though it has not yet passed in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, ADU permits keep surging. LA residents are now building them in their front and backyards; many are serving as housing for people displaced by the fires. The YIMBY movement, as much as it can help the housing crisis, does face at least one criticism: if density increases in fire-prone zones, the number of victims could also rise when fires spread again.

Historical authenticity meets contemporary sustainability

How soon will construction crews start rebuilding any of these homes? Brian Houck, Getty’s grounds and gardens director for the Villa and Center, cautions that it could be a long time. His team conducts emergency planning year-round, and the fires fit one of the worst-case models of what could happen. Right now, LA is in the cleanup phase; for the Villa, this involved the removal of more than 1,400 fire-damaged trees. Of chief concern is regrowing the Villa’s forest, which will not be replaced one-to-one.

While the Villa’s landscape was designed to replicate a first-century Roman garden, the realities of LA’s climate and recent wildfires require a careful, modern approach. Houck is rethinking the blue gum, or eucalyptus, trees, that were planted on the site many decades ago. “There is no reason to plant eucalyptus in today’s world,” he says. Instead, he is considering naturally fire-resistant California live oaks, which the Villa already has, mixed with other California natives.

In addition to these changes, Houck emphasizes restraint with Italian cypresses, which are part of a typical Italian landscape, but were torched during the fires. “Very quickly, they turn orange and are gone,” says Houck. The goal is to create a tall tree canopy, which, along with cover crops and brush clearance, helps hold the erosion-prone hillsides together. Monarch butterflies also count on the Villa’s land as part of their annual migration—tall trees can help foster a rebound of monarchs and other butterfly populations.

Reflecting on these adaptations, Houck says, “We have dialed back from being a 100 percent Roman Empire garden to a reflection of one, adapting to the look and feel of California today.” He adds, “But when a guest enters the landscape, they might squint their eyes a bit and say, ‘This could be Roman.’”

Sustainability efforts expand beyond plant selection. The Villa also plans to build back differently through the irrigation system and is working with an irrigation designer. Most of the old system was made from PVC plastic and laid on top of the ground. It all melted or vaporized and needs to be replaced with a smarter galvanized metal system and possibly water cannons that can soak a landscape with a hundred gallons of water a minute.

Finally, Houck has been working with Camille Kirk, Getty’s sustainability director, on ways to help visitors understand what the recovery process is like. It’s been challenging, but hopeful ideas have begun to emerge from the rubble.

Phoenixes ask hard questions

“We have to live with what nature brings, and here, nature brings fire,” says Kirk. She explains that to live in a fire-adapted ecosystem, we need to ask some hard questions. One group to listen to is Indigenous people, the first stewards of the land: how did they manage fire ecology as a tool? Hard questions must also be asked of manufacturers: how can we have less toxic building materials? And because individuals don’t manufacture building products, Kirk stresses that this is a systems problem that needs systems-level solutions.

While policy, technical, and economic solutions are critical, one of Kirk’s biggest post-fire passions is thinking about the role of the arts and artists. “The role of the arts and humanities is to help interpret the human condition and the world around us to create an understanding, a meaning to reflect on,” she says. “And artists are particularly positioned to help cities think about alternative future visions that can inspire us to build back even better.”

Art institutions must support each other too. The Getty Conservation Institute helped restore the Jackson Pollock mural for the University of Iowa Art Museum, and the Smithsonian has a response program to help protect cultural heritage in disaster recovery settings. “You’re only resilient in community,” says Kirk. “And that takes building a broad network, and sharing resources and knowledge to assist each other before, during, and after disasters.”

In that spirit, on June 14, the Museum will host a Conservation Clinic, in partnership with Art Recovery LA (ARLA), where fire victims can bring household items and heirlooms that were damaged in the disaster. Getty conservators will be on hand to clean soot and ash, remove smoke odor, and assist with archival storage.

As the efforts continue to take shape around LA and at the Getty Center and Villa, Kirk adds, “We can be a phoenix, but it’s going to take some work, and it’s going to take a lot of envisioning.”