It’s hard to imagine Chris Pratt and Kanye West having that much in common. The rapper has become a polarizing national figure for his antisemitic rants and other provocative, unhinged behavior, while Pratt strives to maintain an agreeable, PG-rated, family-friendly persona. But the “Guardians of the Galaxy” star has joined West in becoming a unique kind of cultural villain.
They are both celebrities who used their considerable wealth to buy Los Angeles-area homes that were deemed architectural treasures. Both men then destroyed these singular residences out of an desire to impose their particular aesthetic visions on their properties and surrounding neighborhoods and, in West’s case, to make a statement in the larger world of design. In April, Pratt and his wife, self-help author Katherine Schwarzenegger, became targets of widespread outrage among architecture fans, preservationists and even the national media when it was learned that they “surreptitiously” razed a classic mid-century modern home in Brentwood by famed Southern California architect Craig Elmwood.
The couple had essentially purchased the 74-year-old Zimmerman house as a tear-down, to make way for a 15,000-square-foot structure that Dwell magazine scathingly said would be built in the “increasingly ubiquitous, though contentious” farmhouse style. Now, this week, West has became the subject of a lengthy piece in the New Yorker, which chronicles his destruction of a unique oceanfront home in Malib.