Out of the ashes: rebuilding the Oakland and Berkeley Hills - California

Sunset, Sept, 1994 by Daniel Gregory

How determined families have made innovative architecture a part of their new lives

There is a new Western frontier, and it is the rapidly changing landscape of th Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire zone, across the bay from San Francisco. Along thes flame-shaved slopes, entire neighborhoods are emerging from the ashes, albeit crudely and awkwardly. In the words of city planner Stephen O'Connell: "It's th largest custom-home project in the country, and there is no developer."

Much of this new-old community was first developed in the 1920s, but it continued to evolve as each generation added more houses. Consequently, its housing stock ranged from bungalows, crackerboxes, and modern ranch houses to more substantial, eclectically styled edifices, and included work by such well-known Bay Area architects as Bernard Maybeck and William Wurster. Part of one of the West's great urban forests, the area had acquired its distinctive character over 70 years of building and growth. Then everything--trees, houses, history--vaporized overnight in October 1991.

Three years later, the cinders have surrendered to a new surrealism, a strange tableau that is part contemporary subdivision, part Gold Rush mining town, and part archaeological dig. It's like the video of a city, on fast-forward one moment, pause the next. Raw ranks of just-completed houses crowd together in a veritable stampede of styles, from Mediterranean and Tudor revival to sculptura contemporary. They thrust upward between occasional charred tree stumps and the ruins of old foundations, discovering views that were previously obscured by mature stands of Monterey pine and eucalyptus. The narrow, winding streets teem with construction traffic. Without landscaping to soften edges, scale down building masses, and add context, some streets look brashly overbuilt and barre at the same time.

But it's also a remarkably stirring sight when you realize that here, as in California's other fire-ravaged cities, a courageous community of "resettlers" is at work rebuilding their lives. According to the Oakland Planning Department 70 percent of the new construction is by people who were burned out but refused to take the insurance money and run away. These resilient latter-day pioneers range from a couple in their 30s who had bought their house just 16 days before the fire, to a couple in their 80s who had lived in their house for 43 years. Both have built dramatic, light-filled contemporary houses on their old sites. Recalls Tom Doctor, manager of the Community Restoration Development Center, th unique one-stop permit-processing office established by the city of Oakland to help fire victims rebuild: "The day we opened, on November 25, 1991, there was guy waiting for a building permit."

From the start of reconstruction there were competing and even contradictory goals to rebuild as fast as possible, regain the original neighborhood character, build in a fire-safe manner, and meet a minimum standard of design. Special building regulations have had the most visible effect. For example, combustible, firebrand-launching untreated shake or shingle roofs are forbidden Fire-resistant walls must separate siding materials, decks, projections, and overhangs from the house proper. Fire-sensitive landscape plans are required, and plant materials designated as pyrophites--those high in oils or resins, lik the pines that dominated many neighborhoods--are prohibited. Indeed, you could say that the original neighborhood character that so many people wanted to recapture is now illegal.

Design guidelines are continually evolving, becoming more stringent because of community reaction to "monster houses" built right after the fire. The latest design regulations, published last fall, were too late to affect most of what has been built up to now. According to supervising planner Arnold Mammarella, the biggest difference between the pre- and post-fire houses is that the new houses are designed from the inside out instead of from the outside in. They ar more functional and comfortable. But in many cases, considerations of exterior scale, proportion, and relationship to site appear to have been sacrificed. Say Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Allan Temko: "It's a zoo. But there are gems. They're all waiting for the trees."

Neighborhood groups have proliferated. Before the fire there were half a dozen; now there are about 150. Ironically, concerns about speculators buying up the lots and building oversize houses grew even as many people took the opportunity to build houses that are generally about 20 percent larger than what they had before. View protection has become one of the biggest issues--indeed, the extraordinary views of San Francisco Bay are what drew most people to these hills in the first place. Now, without the trees, the views are even more striking. Power lines are being placed underground, one street is being widened (the bottleneck on Charing Cross Road where 11 fleeing residents died), and strict new parking regulations are in place.