#225: “ON FIRES AND SOCIAL AGENDA,” PART 1 OF 2 | RESILIENCE AND DINGBATS

On the 661st episode of the podcast, Convo by Design, we examined, “Redefining the ‘Strength’ of Southern California Architecture,” with host Josh Cooperman and architects Ben Ballentine and Luis Murillo. From our 90-minute conversation, here is part 1—highlights between Josh and me, edited for length and clarity.

Josh Cooperman: It’s incredible to think that a year and four months after the wildfires in Southern California on January 7th, 2025—that absolutely decimated the Pacific Palisades and Altadena—that we’re still talking about it in terms of recovery, because the process has been so slow. And in the wake of the devastation, the architectural community in Southern California is facing a reckoning. It has no choice.

The idea about strengthening the enclosure, strengthening the envelope of an architectural structure—be it residential, hospitality, commercial, healthcare—the ideas about it haven’t necessarily changed much, but the perceptions have. In five short years, we’ve gone from something that was globally impactful like a pandemic to something that is regionally impactful like the fires, which made everyone think more about the changing nature of architecture. How did all that change the way you work?

Anthony Poon: Well, Josh, you mentioned “strengthening” of the building. That’s only one small part of the exercise. I think this conversation should also be about resilience. There’s really no way you can strengthen a building enough to survive the disasters that may come. It’s equally important to think about how a building recovers from a fire, hurricane, earthquake. And how does a building support the community after something catastrophic? So it isn’t just about being stronger. It’s about being resilient and resourceful, and how to rebuild what we just lost.

Of course the fires are on everyone’s mind, but building strength and resilience involve much more. Being that we design schools, we have to be conscious about designing strength in new ways—for example, school shootings, unfortunately. It’s a difficult conversation when you’re designing a great school, and a teacher asks where the students should hide during a shooting. Will this amount of windows, which we all want for natural light and the indoor/outdoor connection, be an issue?

If we’re just going to design for strength, you’re going to have a house that is a bomb shelter. Or a school that is all concrete with metal bars in the windows. So there must be a balance. It’s not just “form follows function,” because if the function is strength and security, what kind of form are you ending up?

Josh: I don’t think that there is any real critique of architecture anymore. How there are still dingbats in this city is just staggering to me.

Anthony: But it’s great that dingbats still exists.

Josh: Is it?

Anthony: Dingbats are such a legacy of Los Angeles—the period, the style, something so unique and cool within our architectural culture.

Josh: Okay, great point. But Dingbats were notorious for crumbling in earthquakes. They were not well built, just like the Googies. I’m going to put a pin in this—I love my debates with you, and I’m definitely coming back to it. I feel that there is an opportunity for architects now to do something significant. Maybe the last time this happened was when the GIs came home from World War II.

Josh: So okay, are you changing the way you specify?

Anthony: With specifications, we have to talk about investment and value. If we’re designing, say a hotel lobby, it could be an affordable ceramic tile flooring or something that’s twice as expensive like terrazzo. But we point out how ceramic tile is not going to last as long as terrazzo. Tile is going to chip, need to be regrouted, and/or replaced altogether. Terrazzo can last 50 years, a hundred years.

I believe it was Ben that mentioned, “authenticity” in materials. I think with growing technology, the focus on authentic and real materials might start to fade.

I think back to the older days of fashion. Then, it was important that a suit was 100% real wool or a tie 100% real silk. But nowadays, fashion is driven by all kinds of new materials, like polyblends, synthetic stretch materials, plant-based latex—things that old school fashion designers would have never considered.

Similar options exist today in architecture. Yeah, I agree that fake stone trying to look like real stone is not good, but there’s so many other kinds of new materials. And this gets back to fire resistance. There are materials— like natural wood—that may not do as well as some of these new material combinations and technologies.

Josh: How do we find the time to research all this?

Anthony: It’s almost like how can you not, because of the risk of doing something wrong? Something I think about is scale. If you do a single custom house, you could try some new things and even take a few risks. But we’ve done mass production housing, as in tract homes, where a single house design is replicated a hundred times. If you get one material thing wrong, like, “We tried that and it didn’t work,” well, you’re not just getting a call from one client, you might get a class action lawsuit. So that’s when we experiment less and go back to best practices.