Designing for Endless Fire – Harvard Design Magazine

Wildfires are nothing new in Los Angeles. Nor is the overlap between fire and the cultural imagination in Southern California. Literary, artistic, and cinematic depictions of the city and its architectural landmarks in flames go back more than a century, an apocalyptic canon that includes work by the painter Edward Ruscha (The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968), the writer Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower, 1993), the film director Mick Jackson (whose 1997 blockbuster, Volcano, sends a river of lava down Wilshire Boulevard) and, most prescient of all, Nathanael West, whose 1939 novella, The Day of the Locust, features a protagonist, Tod Hackett, who is working on a giant painting called The Burning of Los Angeles. As Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1965, in a much-cited essay on the Santa Ana winds that many Angelenos are weary of by now (though few would dispute its conclusions): “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.”

Source: Designing for Endless Fire – Harvard Design Magazine