Remembering the Los Angeles fires of January 2025, which destroyed over 9,000 buildings, many of these homes, schools, places of work … and fourteen places of worship. Human fatalities and injuries, and massive loss of wildlife habitats occurred.
Terraviva launched the internation architectural competition: ‘Rising from Ashes’ in 2025 to look for insightful architectural responses to a vacant site in Altedena, north of Pasedena in Los Angeles. This area had seen some of the worst damage during the fires.
The brief requires a series of buildings that would accommodate a new worshiping space, a community gathering space with cooking facilities, an education block with modest rooms from nursery to adult, and additional rooms for administration of the complex.
Having visited this area of LA in 2023, and being intrigued by the many social and cultural identities that call it home, I was curious to explore how architecture can be a responds to these needs.
Researching the records of the earliest communities that called north-east LA their home, I was helped greatly by the work of the LA Times “Mapping the Tongva villages of L.A.’s past” 2019, and its easily acceible online resource at https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-tongva-map/.
We learn that, before the 1770’s, the Los Angeles region was known as Tovaangar, and home to the Tongva peoples. Maps are uncovered that show the various permanent settlements and tribal lands that made up greater Tovaangar (courtesy LA Times). The Hahamog-nai were the tribe specifically settled on the Altedena lands. Here they would have typically lived in Kiiy dwellings, domes shaped structures covered with tule reeds, and framed by timber or whalebone. The progress of European settlers saw their lans, architecture and all they held sacred virtually erased.
The loss of then, and the loss of now already resonate. So, how to respectfully channel these emotional loads of then and now, into an architectural programme, a building of where to go next …
