Healing the Heart of LA competition winners help the city regain hope by repurposing lost landmarks

The organizers of the Healing the Heart of LA competition, FORT: LA, have named two winners at the culmination of a very timely contest whose organizers hoped to inspire resilience and determination in the midst of rebuilding for fire-stricken communities in Los Angeles. 

Selected from a crop of design proposals that were aimed at rehabilitating one of the many architectural landmarks lost in the Altadena area and the Pacific Palisades, the winners chosen by jury members Adrian Scott Fine, Christina Morris, Sharon Johnston, Siddhartha Majumdar, Rochelle Mills, Sam Lubell, and Frances Anderton stood out for their sensibility to memory, place, and the sustainable mandate for a more secure future.

The first, a student team from the USC School of Architecture, imagined a "resilient rebuild" of the lost Nature Friends Clubhouse in Sierra Madre. Designers Payton Hughes, Daybrea Ayers, and Jemima Chery repurposed the surviving 105-year-old masonry base of the structure as the foundation on top of which the new, energy-efficient Nature Friends Clubhouse arises. 

They say it is designed to use the natural topography of the site for thermal mass. Some highlights include a second-floor mezzanine and a memorial wall to the structure's history made using salvaged artifacts. Overall, it offers a "harmony of a sustainable community, representing how the future and past can still be present structurally and culturally for future generations to cherish."

Joining theirs as a co-winner was a proposal from Palisades native Finn Bradley that repurposes the perimeter wall and facade left over from the Pacific Palisades Business Block of 1924 as the Colosseum-like walls inside of which a new public park with multiple uses (an amphitheater, farmers market, and areas for arts or education) takes shape. 

In the end, the design process has offered some catharsis, organizers say. Contestant Mirko Wanders added the competition "shows a little bit of what LA is and what LA can be." One proposal, Evan Hall’s idea memorial made from recuperated chimneys in the Palisades, is moving forward to an eventual realization with help from the nonprofit House Museum.

A video roundtable featuring the competition's winners can be viewed below.