My dad, Dennis McFadden, taught me how to look at buildings as beings.
He’s an architect and has lived in Los Angeles since he was a toddler, except for two years away for graduate school. He told me that buildings have many stages of life, as all beings do. First, for a designer, they exist in your mind, as part of you. Then you draw them, mold them into something better. And then they get built, and exist in the world.
I’d seen his buildings at just about every stage, from pencil sketches in notebooks to construction sites to finished products. But I’d never seen one after death.
The truth is, he’d forgotten about 822 Haverford Avenue, even though it had been special to him once. It was the first of his designs to be built, a career milestone for him back then, in 1980. He was 28, just a couple of years older than I am now, and fresh out of graduate school. Seeing it go up, he said, made him feel for the first time that he was a real architect.
“You realize you have some agency and you have some skills and some power to make something,” he told me. “Building a building, for architects anyway, is leaving a permanent mark on the world.”
We were certain that mark was gone now: The condo complex at 822 Haverford Avenue was in the middle of the area devastated by the Palisades fire.
He pulled out a dusty portfolio and we pored over it at the kitchen table in the Los Angeles house where he lives and where I grew up. We flipped through laminated pages of plans, hand-drawn in careful black ink, and grainy photographs taken when the building was brand-new.
“I was a workaholic, not too much different than what I am now,” he said.
I went looking the next day for the building my dad had designed more than 40 years ago.
Fire has a way of equalizing. When I got out of my car in Pacific Palisades, each lot looked pretty much the same: one set of rubble next to one set of rubble next to another. I tried to make out the design elements my dad had described the night before.
Two doorways stood precariously over a pit of ashy wreckage. These, I supposed, had been entrances to the first two units. I recognized the thin black window frames — once-rectangular portals placed strategically to give the units privacy and a view of Temescal Canyon. Those window frames survived, strangely intact, like angular line drawings dotting the wreckage.
Back at the house, I showed him pictures I’d taken on my phone. He flipped through them, silent. “Devastating to look at,” he said after a while. “Shocking.”
My dad never knew who lived inside 822 Haverford. He hopes they liked it, and that it made a good home. What he told me about buildings being alive was only part of the story, it turns out.
“You send it out into the world to have a great life,” he said. “And it’s really only alive because of the people who live in it.”
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