Story by Kenna Jenkins
California has had a total of 1,292 wildfires this year, resulting in 63,677 acres burned, and if data is anything to go by, it’s just the beginning.
Robert Goodman, a forestry professor at Citrus College, said that while the forest services would love to do more controlled burns, it’s not possible.
“We live in Los Angeles, where we have the AQMD (Air Quality Management District) … they regulate the amount of smoke and particulates in our atmosphere,” he said. “Control burns can only happen at certain times of the year when moisture and humidity are at the right levels, meaning that when we set something on fire we can control it.”
“Controlled burns in a chaparral community is important but can easily get out of hand because all the plants that we have here have evolved with this mediterranean climate,” Goodman said.
“We’re just kind of in this flux of no consistent weather patterns,” he said. “Typically around here we get November, December, January, February, little bit of March, little bit of April … we didn’t get rain until February.”
As fires become more devastating and unpredictable, people are making an effort to protect things important to their communities, one of these things is architecture.
In August 2023 the Hawaiian island of Maui was devastated by a wildfire that destroyed over 2,200 structures. But the historic district of Lahaina was hit the hardest.
William Chapman, who is the dean of University of Hawaii at Manoa’s School of Architecture, had an idea to support his community after the destruction.
“I kept thinking … need to have a visualization,” Chapman said, “… we need to try and figure out a way for people to have a sense of what it could be.”
People had suggested just moving Lahaina, rebuilding in a different place, which was a conversation Chapman remembers after the devastation Hurricane Katrina had in 2005.
“I would listen to planners talk about abandoning New Orleans because it’s too low,” he said. “And I thought, ‘That’s like abandoning a whole culture,’ and close to the million people and architectural traditions that go back to … the period of French Loisuiana.”
“I felt the same way about Lahaina … I knew that in the past, most of these buildings had been repaired quite drastically,” Chapman said.
This is when he said he reached out to his colleague Hyoung-June Park, who is an associate professor of design and computation at the School of Architecture. Park then reached out to Kyung Hoon Hyun, who is a design computing specialist at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.
Park and Hyun worked together for the course that would become “ARCH 490: Rebuilding Lahaina in Mixed Reality,” which was launched in 2024. Chapman said the class just finished its second semester.
Chapman said the class received a good response from the public and the university’s upper administration.
Chapman’s provost, Michael Bruno, was discouraged by the wildfires but was “happy to see some possibly,” after the progress of the course was shared.
Even with all the positive work being done after the devastation the question still remained as to what to do before.
Chapman said he’s doing a project this summer we’re they’ll use digital technology to record a historic building in the community. It’s a modernist building by architects named Pete Wimberley and Jean Charlot.
He explained in July they’ll do measured drawings, which the Society of American Archivist defines as “architectural drawings, made to scale, of a building or structure,” which are not used to guide construction, only to document.
Chapman said they will be using a laser based technology called lidar.
Lidar stands for “Light Detection and Ranging” which uses a “light in the form of pulsed laser to measure ranges,” which are combined with other recorded data.
After the burning of Notre Dame in Paris in 2019, Andrew Tallon’s, who’s an art historian, scans from 2015 were a big part of the church’s reconstruction.
Amy Bunszel, executive vice president of architecture, engineering and construction at 3D-software company Autodesk, told CNN in 2024 that, “The time frame wouldn’t have been possible without the record of what existed.”
“It would’ve required a lot more guesswork,” Bunszel told CNN. “Imagine taking millions of tourist photographs (as a reference point) versus having one consolidated perfect representation.”
Chapman remembers following the destruction of the Eaton and Palisades fire and keeping up with friends and colleagues in the area.
“Rebuilding Pacific Palisades in Malibu is going to be a big challenge … I talked to Ken Berstein, who is the head of historic preservation for the city of Los Angeles, and he admitted they had buildings on their inventory that had never been listed.”
Experts in preservation are an important part of rebuilding after disasters like wildfires.
While Bridget Lawlor, who is the preservation director at Pasadena Heritage, mostly focuses on advocacy, the recent fires have changed the way things are done.
“We were all so caught off guard by the devastation of these fires (Eaton and Palisades),” she said. “ … In Pasadena, we lost about 180 structures … in Altadena, they lost 5,500.”
Lawlor said Pasadena Heritage has been working closely with organizations like Foothill Catalog Foundation, Altadena Historical Society, and Bungalow Heaven to preserve as much as they can in Altadena following the fires.
“But I think going forward … what we’re really trying to do is, and what other organizations like LA Conservancy, which is like a sister organization, are doing is … conducting surveys of historic structures,” she said.
Lawlor said the Historic Resources Group geographic information mapping, also referred to as GIS, of historic resources.
GIS, when in a historic context, uses, “historical geographic data, historical maps, and spatial analysis tools to visualize and study historical information. GIS for history often involves digitizing historical scanned maps, mapping census records, (and) archeological data.”
Lawlor said the Historic Resources Group used that data to see how close certain things were to the burn zones.
“I think we should start really taking inventory of places that are particularly in these more prone wildfire areas,” she said. “… encourage local registries of at risk … properties … so we can be aware of them.”
“I think that going forward, if we could try to keep the character of … buildings that would have historically been there, but building back with materials that are ‘A’ more environmentally friendly and ‘B’ more fire resilient,” she explained.
“I think that how it was prior to the fire is that we were all very siloed in our communities,” Lawlor said. “So Pasadena, we looked out for Pasadena … Altadena looked out for just Altadena. And so now it’s to a point where we have recognized that we all kind of need each other.”
“I feel like community has really been found outside of our border, our local borders, … and we (Pasadena Heritage) want to be a support system for Altadena going forward,” Lawlor said.
This story was created by students in Citrus College’s Multimedia Journalism class, COMM 250, and published in conjunction with the Citrus College Clarion.
