LOS ANGELES, CA (April 28, 2025) – Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles (FORT: LA) is pleased to announce the winning entries of the Healing the Heart of LA Design Competition. The initiative invited architects and designers to reimagine architectural treasures lost in the devastating 2025 LA Fires as a way of envisioning a resilient and sustainable future while honoring the city’s rich heritage.
Participants were challenged to select specific sites lost in the fires–ones such as Altadena’s Bunny Museum, Scripps Hall and Park Planned Homes by Gregory Ain, Pacific Palisades’ Will Rogers Ranch House, Business Block and Corpus Christi Church, and Malibu’s Reel Inn, Moonshadows and Feed Bin–and imagine a new “residential treasure.” The jury included architecture, preservation, and design criticism leaders Frances Anderton, Adrian Scott Fine, Sharon Johnston, Sam Lubell, Siddhartha Majumdar, Rochelle Mills, and Christina Morris.
Celebrated for their innovative approaches to Memory, Resilience, and Recovery, the winning submissions were unveiled, along with all competition entries, at a special opening reception on Friday, April 25th, at the AIA|LA and ACLA’s Center for Communities. Given the geographic scale of the fires, the jury opted to award two submissions the top honors and a $1500 prize each–one impacted by the Eaton Fire and one by the Palisades Fire.
WINNING ENTRIES
Nature Friends Clubhouse by USC Architecture students Payton Hughes, Daybrea Ayers and Jemima Cherry
Nature Friends Clubhouse was a non-profit retreat in Sierra Madre, California, that centered around community and fun through embracing nature and the surrounding environment. The team’s revision aims to emulate the morals of the clubhouse in a contemporary way. The new Nature Friends Clubhouse is a modern, resilient space designed to fuse with its natural surroundings while meeting the community’s evolving needs. Its energy-efficient design uses the natural topography for thermal mass, and expansive windows provide a seamless indoor and outdoor blend.
Highlights include a second-floor mezzanine and balcony for socializing and enjoying views of the dancefloor, plus third-floor private spaces for meetings and a memorial wall honoring the clubhouse’s history with salvaged artifacts. It’s a thoughtful blend of sustainability, community, and remembrance. While the clubhouse no longer stands in its original condition, visitors will understand its impact. This reimagined clubhouse is the harmony of a sustainable community, representing how the future and past can still be present structurally and culturally for future generations to cherish.
Juror Rochelle Mills, President + CEO of Innovative Housing Opportunities, notes, “The Nature Friends Clubhouse submission truly considered the way the public would experience the location through the architecture and not the other way around.”
One Palisades Memorial by Architect Finn Bradley
The One Palisades Memorial transforms The Business Block by becoming a new public space that would memorialize the history of the Palisades, while creating an incredible outdoor park for the Community. The Business Block is the anchor point of the Palisades, it starts the 4th of July parade, the weekly farmers market is on the block. The One Palisades Memorial can better host those beloved activities within its preserved walls and will create many new traditions by having an amphitheater for live performances, outdoor cafes, gardens, and gathering spaces for educational or recreational purposes.
The memorial park would utilize noncombustible materials only, for example the cafe pavilion within the facade would be made from the ICPbuilding material by RSG-3D, a sustainable and resilient panel system. The Palisades is sandwiched between the Santa Monica mountains and the Pacific Ocean so it creates a more tropical desert climate with a constant marine layer over the town, the landscape and vegetation in the Memorial park would host the local flora and fauna ecologies found in the Palisades.
Juror Christina Morris, Senior Director of Preservation Programs for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, noted, “FORT: LA’s Healing the Heart of LA design competition is an important moment in LA’s recovery, encouraging people to look forward in the wake of the fires by rethinking their lost community touchstones and giving them new life and meaning. The One Palisades Memorial proposal exemplifies this, transforming the shell of the historic Business Block into a gracious new public park space that invites gathering, growth, and commemoration.”
VIEW THE EXHIBITIONS
Center for Communities
When: April 25 – May 1 | 10AM – 5PM
Where: Center for Communities, 4450 West Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90016
18th Street Arts Center
When: April 28 – May 2 | 10AM – 5PM
Where: 18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St, Santa Monica, CA 90404
View Online at FORT: LA
When: Starting April 26
ABOUT FORT: LA | fortla.org | @fort.losangeles
Friends Of Residential Treasures: LA (FORT: LA) is an award-winning nonprofit dedicated to energizing, educating and connecting Angelenos through the dynamic stories of our homes, neighborhoods, and architecture. The organization has developed four interlocking programs in pursuit of its mission: An online mapping system for self-guided tours of the exteriors of architecturally significant homes developed by experts in the field (FORT Trails); a fellowship to foster new knowledge (FORT Fellowship); a series of virtual experiences to provide interior access and understanding (FORT Frames); and an ongoing series of live and virtual educational events (FORT Gatherings). FORT: LA is a recipient of an LA Conservancy Preservation award, a California Preservation Foundation Design award, and will be featured in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. FORT: LA’s newsletter announcing its free monthly content reaches over 10,000 subscribers.
