2025-02-01
17 分钟The city faces a choice: remake itself into something largely familiar or take a bolder path and emerge as a new metropolis.
Hi, my name is Michael Kimmelman, and I'm the architecture critic for the New York Times.
Everyone is still trying to figure out the extent of the damage in Los Angeles,
but we're talking about dozens of square miles, more than 10,000 structures,
and really whole communities like the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
As soon as I saw the fires, I started thinking what the future of that city might be.
There's a long history of cities being remade by disasters, many of them fires.
London, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle,
and many other cities over the years have become very different.
There's an old line that crises are opportunities,
and for cities, that has historically been the case.
But those transitions are often very complicated, and often they take longer than we believe.
After the years have passed,
the LA area is especially prone to a lot of different kinds of natural disasters.
Floods, droughts, earthquakes, of course.
But we tend to forget
that actually fires have been a constant drumbeat in Los Angeles even in recent decades.
There was a fire in bel air in 1961 that wiped out that neighborhood,
destroyed the homes of many celebrities,
raised discussions about whether it was even logical to live in the chaparral in the foothills,
and then everyone moved back.