To live in Los Angeles is to be regularly reminded that much of what surrounds its residents is fleeting. That pertains, most essentially, to human life and the natural world, as the deadly fires reminded us this week. But also to both the vital everyday structures and the cultural monuments that helped mark this place’s stunning achievements, told its citizens’ stories and embodied its startling confluence of talent, originality and freedom.
Several cherished landmarks ranging from the city’s early history, to its experimental, midcentury modern period and its contemporary era, have fallen victim to the deadly wildfires that have ravaged the region.
On Wednesday news arrived of the loss of the historic ranch house that once belonged to the beloved Hollywood cowboy and comedian Will Rogers, who in the 1920s bought up hundreds of acres in the foothills of the Pacific Palisades.
This land, now a California State Park, is a place where you can hop on a trail and find a glowing, majestic overlook of the ocean in about 10 minutes. Rogers’s rustic clapboard home from 1926, with its wide porch and open courtyard standing on a slight rise, was like a walk into a rural time warp; a hybrid of authentic country life and Los Angeles-style enhancement. There was the wagon wheel chandelier, the barnlike rafters, the heavy stone fireplace with a mounted prize longhorn head, and endless Western paraphernalia, including saddles, Navajo rugs and sepia family photos.
Rogers hosted Walt Disney here, along with Clark Gable and Charles Lindbergh. Just as wondrous were the adjacent timber stables right off the courtyard. Rogers’s visitors went there to saddle up their horses on their way to the adjacent riding area and, below that, the polo field.
Victoria Yust, an architect based in Venice, Calif., called it her “happy place” when we visited about a year ago. “There was something so magical about it,” she said on Wednesday. “It just felt like old California. You could just imagine this incredible way of life.” She was particularly taken by the stables’ central rotunda, whose intricate radial rafters quietly took your breath away. It was an architectural gem, hiding in plain site as hikers made their way up the canyon behind.
“It’s a completely devastating blow for all of us,” said Adrian Scott Fine, chief executive of the Los Angeles Conservancy, the region’s major preservation advocacy group. “It’s just a touchstone. You can’t hardly talk about Southern California history and the Pacific Palisades without acknowledging this cultural folk hero, Will Rogers.”
Fine said he and his colleagues have their hands full tracking the destruction of cultural heritage in the region.
“These are profound losses,” he said. “There are no other places like these that can tell these kinds of stories.”
Another major loss in Pacific Palisades is Ray Kappe’s Keeler House from 1991, considered one of the hallmarks of this talented, often overlooked Los Angeles architect. (Kappe, who died in 2019, was a founder of the avant-garde Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc.)
The home’s owner, Anne Keeler, 68, is safely out of town. She said that a neighbor confirmed to her that it had been destroyed. “It’s gone,” she said.
Cantilevered atop a steep hillside site and peering over the ocean, the residence typified Kappe’s bravery and intuitive craft. It unfolded down its site via a central stair lit by a long gabled skylight, connected to the scene below with outsize windows. Flanked by floating, staggered floors and oversize balconies, the ethereal property remained grounded through the heft of exposed redwood and smooth, thick concrete.
While the home’s dramatic views and monumental forms beguiled visitors, Keeler, who had lived there since its completion, especially liked details like the silky redwood surfaces. “We were all stroking the wood when it arrived. It was so beautiful,” she said. The upper floor’s exposed redwood beams, she noted, were formed from overlapping boards, giving them a surprising texture and presence. “To be able to sit at the dining room table and look up and see those amazing joists and their shadows — that’s something I really enjoyed,” she said.
Crosby Doe, a real estate agent whose firm focuses on architect-designed properties, had been working with Keeler to sell the home, which was listed for $8 million. “I’ve been looking at important houses from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry for over 50 years, and I considered this one of the 10 most creative works of architecture that I’ve ever seen,” Doe said.
Not far from the Keeler house, perched on concrete stilts over a curving stretch of Sunset Boulevard, the timber-sided Bridges house has also been confirmed as burned by two people who have been to the site. Its architect, Robert Bridges, now an emeritus professor at the USC Marshall School of Business, built the home in 1974, and it had since stood as a monument to the structural daring of the region’s buildings. “It may look precarious, but it’s not,” Bridges told The Times in a 2014 article. “From an engineering standpoint, this thing is absolutely rational.”
These losses are being felt far beyond the Palisades. In Altadena, the Eaton fire has already claimed two cultural treasures: the 1907 Zane Grey Estate, the Mediterranean-style residence of one of California’s great Western novelists; and the 1887 Andrew McNally House, a Queen Anne gem that was home to the mapmaking tycoon who co-founded Rand-McNally.
Grey, who wrote adventure stories like “Riders of the Purple Sage,” “Wildfire” and “The Rainbow Trail,” turned to Myron Hunt, the prolific architect who designed the Rose Bowl and the Ambassador Hotel. “It was just a massive landmark,” Fine said of the Zane Grey estate, adding that the Conservancy had planned to hold its annual benefit there this year.
Attractions of the McNally House, by the architect Frederick Roehrig, include its bell-shaped roof, bluish green shingles, seven fireplaces and magnificently eclectic period rooms, highlighted by the lavish Turkish room.
Not all the buildings that have been destroyed were architectural monuments. Some, like Malibu’s ramshackle Reel Inn (and beachfront favorites like Gladstones and Moonshadows) and the cozy red confines of Altadena’s Fox’s, were neighborhood institutions. The bungalow-style Topanga Ranch Motel was built in 1929 by none other than William Randolph Hearst. There was Altadena’s Bunny Museum, which housed more than 45,000 bunny objects, and the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, which had stood for more than 80 years.
So now comes the anxious waiting, to find out what else has fallen, and may still. We refresh fire maps, whose red outlines inch ever closer to beloved landmarks. Some of the world’s great architecture sits helplessly on the edge.
In the Palisades there’s Kappe’s own celebrated residence, on a slope in Rustic Canyon; its concrete towers support a series of floating platforms, merging with the outside via massive windows.
There is, of course, Charles and Ray Eames’s revolutionary Eames House, its colorful prefabricated panels a symbol of midcentury experiment. It is bordered by a bevy of modernist monuments, like Rodney Walker’s Case Study House #18, Richard Neutra’s Case Study House #20 and Eero Saarinen’s Entenza House. Among others in the evacuation zone are Frank Gehry’s new home on Adelaide Drive, his Schnabel House (1989) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sturges House (1939).
The fires, in their destructive rage, have highlighted the spectacular architectural legacy of Los Angeles — one that is often taken for granted, or even ignored. They remind us that the city has long been one of the world’s great laboratories for residential architecture, and that its best buildings are vaunted pieces of art, and equally vulnerable to the ravages of nature.
Los Angeles won’t be able to replace what’s lost, and people may not even be allowed to build on some of these sites again. But it is possible to think harder about what we want next, and how it can live up to such extraordinary achievements.
