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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.
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“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.
