Salvaged chimneys from the Palisades fire are a tangible memorial to L.A.’s unspeakable loss

High above Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Kraig Hill stood on a concrete slab and gave a tour of a home that is no longer there. Destroyed in the January wildfires, the home Hill grew up in now exists only as a blueprint in his mind.

A concrete Buddha used to gaze toward the horizon from its perch beneath a coral tree. Behind the house was the swimming pool that Hill, a semi-professional musician and producer, and his partner Hashi Clark, an artist, converted into a concert venue. They used to invite guests to sit in the shallow end to listen to musician friends playing in the deep end.

Murky rainwater now filled the pool-slash-auditorium. The Buddha survived, but the coral tree that shaded it was gone. Only one small piece of the house remained: a brick fireplace with its chimney, situated near windows with bird’s-eye views of the Pacific Ocean below.

The fireplace was the living room’s only heat source. Hill and his family would gather around it when he was young to keep warm on chilly winter days.

So when conceptual artist Evan Curtis Charles Hall asked Hill if he wanted to be a part of Project Chimney, a planned memorial to the January fires that will be made up of chimneys salvaged from six destroyed homes — five in Pacific Palisades and one, Hill’s home, in Malibu — Hill didn’t hesitate.

Los Angeles artist Evan Curtis Charles Hall.

“This house was a part of me — and vice versa,” Hill said. With little left besides memories for those who lost houses in the fire, chimneys — the only architectural feature left intact at many homes — contain new layers of symbolism.

Hall, founding director of the landmark preservation nonprofit House Museum, recently completed the painstaking relocation of the weighty structures, enlisting volunteer brick masons, structural engineers and architectural consultants, and raising donor money for equipment and supplies. The chimneys came from homes built between 1920 and 2020, including ones designed by heavyweight midcentury architects such as Richard Neutra, Eric Lloyd Wright and Ray Kappe.

Hall said he wasn’t able to salvage chimneys from houses in other fire-disaster zones such as in Altadena.

The chimneys for his project, some of which had to be carefully dismantled to transport them safely, are in temporary storage until Hall raises enough money to complete the project — and until he secures a permanent location in the Palisades for the memorial.

In its purest sense, the memorial is a “ready-made” work of art consisting of prefabricated components that he plans to present in a new context. But it also serves as a site of pilgrimage. Both victims of the fire and those unaffected by it can come to reflect on the ferocity of nature, the climate resilience of fire-resistant materials and the power of objects to reinforce our sense of belonging.

Hill’s childhood home had been in his family for 55 years. He lived there as a kid, and as an adult stayed at the house off and on. By the mid-1990s, he had started living there on a permanent basis, making repairs as needed since then.

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1. A pile of bricks from a chimney of a home destroyed in the Palisades fire. 2. Hall holds a part of a chimney.

“I can tell you where every screw and nail and stud is,” said Hill, now 65. “I did the sewer and I fixed the electric and we worked so much on the planting and landscaping. There’s so much of our own vision, blood, sweat and tears.” One example: the control booth he built in the living room to record live music.

Moving back “inside,” Hill pointed out where the fireplace used to heat the living-room-turned-studio, before it became solely an architectural element. The couple had stopped lighting fires for warmth and instead hung a long mirror over it so that it reflected a panorama stretching up the coast to Point Dume, 13 miles away.

Now the fireplace will serve a new purpose as a part of the memorial.

When developing his idea for the memorial, Hall studied the architectural pedigree of each house before planning the extractions of their chimneys, hulking towers of brick, stone and mortar. But his motivation is more human-scale.

He spent time, he said, listening to homeowners who offered to donate their chimneys as they juggled calls to emergency agencies, insurers and contractors. Those conversations helped him feel the heft of their trauma and grief.

As new houses rise where old ones succumbed, Hall wants to give the homeowners and all Angelenos a place where they can metaphorically and physically touch the past — and process the disaster in their own ways.

“For homeowners, it will represent a piece of their home and it will cause memories to surface of family conversations and gatherings around the holidays around the fireplace,” Hall said. “For others, just the sheer magnitude of them may harken back to other monumental structures like obelisks or totem poles or large megalithic rocks like you see at Stonehenge. But the point really for the memorial is for it to be a place … where people can encounter something from the pre-fire Palisades and confront also the reality that the landscape is changing — and that fires are a part of living in Southern California.”

Hall uncovers piles of bricks collected from chimneys of homes destroyed in the Palisades fire, which will be used for a memorial he is working on in Pacific Palisades.

Hall said he sometimes lies among the bricks and listens to them, as if by some magic force they could relay all of the mundane and momentous experiences they’ve witnessed.

Hill, a former Malibu planning commissioner, describes himself as someone not prone to talking about spirits. But he too leans toward the mystical when discussing how non-living things can possess human-like qualities.

When the deadly Old Topanga fire struck Malibu in 1993, Hill was in law school in Seattle. The blaze scorched fences, outbuildings and pool equipment around his childhood home, yet spared the main house. When Hill visited to assess the damage, he found scattered across the hillside pages of burnt sheet music he had used to practice on a piano that once graced the living room. He framed the sheets and hung the makeshift memorial above the fireplace.

“It was just this really cool kind of remembrance of what the house had lived through,” Hill said.

Hall wants to do with the chimneys what Hill did by framing those singed pieces of music — to create a work of art born from disaster that symbolizes the will to carry on.

“This is not the end for the material, and I think that’s a nice analogy to think about the whole landscape,” Hall said. “You can see all of the regrowth and the rebirth that’s taking place, so we know that time is moving and we have to go forward.”