The impact of the January 2025 Southern California fires on the buildings of Haralamb Georgescu in Los Angeles

Haralamb Georgescu was a Romanian architect who fleed the communist rule and settled in the USA. After a brief period in the Eastern part, he settled in Los Angeles where not only did he build his most iconic buildings, but also was featured for futuristic utopic designs. Within the Romanian funded project "Future on the past" (featured at EGU 2023), which used digital humanities methods to develop innovative mapping techniques, including ontologies, for earthquake, flood and fire, also the buildings of Haralamb Georgescu were studied. This happened in conjunction with another Romanian sister project (both ended with the PNIII framework programme on the 31.12.2024) which focused on Romanian-American relationships in the interwar time in a publication of which first results were published. Haralamb Georgescu started his career in the interwar time in Romania. 2-7 January 2025 I visited Mangalia where is his last building built in Romania. Some others built in Bucharest were mapped before, and so were those in the USA, including Los Angeles. Materials on Los Angeles were available from two sources: the Getty archives and a book of drawings of building projects, catalogue of a past exhibition at the "Ion Mincu" University of Architecture and Urbanism, which was done after the rediscovery of Haralamb Georgescu following the restoration of the Pasinetti house, the most emblematic one, featured in a magazine of the time. The mapping in Google Maps of the buildings of Haralamb Georgescu was exported and imported in arcGIS online Living Atlas, the map on US current wildfires. This way three buildings of Haralamb Georgescu were identified (Bucharest restaurant next to the Eaton forest, Lark Arrow apartments in the same area, Rinaldi convalescent hospital) next to wildfires and one on a wildfire and this was the Pasinetti House in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately searching the news confirmed the mapping as the CBS reported dogs being rescued from the lost house of Pasinetti. Besides, during the project in frame of work for COST CA18135 - Fire in the Earth System: Science & Society (FIRElinks), as working group member of group 5 Socio-economic aspects of fire and fire risk management, an ontology of fire was developed and published. This contribution will test how the findings fit into this ontology. Current work is being done in the Climate change adaptation working group of ICOMOS ISCARSAH related to the structures of monuments which includes the effects of wildfire. The architecture of Haralamb Georgescu is Modernist architecture related in typology to that of the Cyclades, and the publication from the COST action also covered the relationship to fires in Greece, specifically Paros in 2022. Some more insights on this will be included after more site visits. This is in line with the research question of the project on how vernacular architecture may render Modernist buildings which include elements inspired by it more safe, through so-called local culture, extensively studied so far for seismic events and started for flood events, but scarcely so for wildfires. The ontology in computer science understanding helps this.