02/19/2025

How Architects are Designing for Disaster Resilience

This is also something homeowners must consider when building and buying

On Jan. 7, architect Greg Chasen rushed to his childhood home in Pacific Palisades, a well-off Los Angeles neighborhood tucked between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean, to remove any flammables and turn on the sprinklers.

"You could hear exploding propane tanks and see the flames reflected in the smoke," he said. "I was sure that fire was going to tear through overnight." At some point, there was nothing left to do but go home and wait.

At dawn the next day, Chasen jumped on his bike to inspect the damage, bracing for the worst. While just a few degrees of wind direction had saved his parents’ home from the flames, other streets weren’t as lucky. Next, he went to check on a house he had finished building for a friend only six months earlier. As he got closer, the magnitude of the destruction hit him—almost the entire neighborhood was gone. “More houses were going up in flames, and everything had this acrid smell of burning plastic,” he says. But there it was, the newly built two-story house, remarkably untouched. While 120 houses farther down the street had been transformed into piles of ashes, Chasen’s fire—resistant design had withstood the heat from the flames.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.