• AI-Driven Rebuilding in Los Angeles: Archistar’s eCheck software accelerates permit approvals, helping fire-damaged neighborhoods recover faster.
• Human + AI Collaboration: The LA tech team reviews every plan to ensure code compliance, blending advanced AI with expert architectural oversight.
• Local Expertise for Fire Recovery: Based in Culver City, the Archistar Los Angeles team partners with the City and County of Los Angeles to rebuild homes after the Eaton and Palisades fires.

For any major project to be done right, AI needs humans. That’s especially the case for rebuilding thousands of homes following the devastation of Los Angeles’ Eaton and Palisades fires in January 2025.

Earlier this year, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a partnership between Archistar and the City and County of Los Angeles. Soon after, the Los Angeles Times reported that fire survivors’ first interactions to rebuild could be with a robot—not a physical robot, but a super intelligent AI platform called eCheck.

The partnership objective is to use Archistar eCheck software to speed up the building-permit-approval process and get people back into their homes. Architects submit plans to Archistar, and the AI does complex checks to ensure the plans will pass all necessary regulations in the Los Angeles area before Archistar hands off the plan to the City or County of LA.

But the “robot” is not the whole story. When architects submit their design plans to Archistar, it’s the human architecture, code, and tech experts who manage the process. AI doesn’t just magically ingest the plan and spit out a report. It’s the human-AI collaboration that makes it all work.

There are six members of the tech team in Archistar’s LA office who help make rebuilding in LA possible. Moniba Montazeri, the team manager, has a Master of Architecture from IAU-SRB University in Tehran, Iran. Before joining Archistar, she specialized in schematic design and documentation for high-end residential, mixed-use, and retail developments across California.

“My team and I feel honored to be part of the Archistar team, using our knowledge and AI technology to help families in Los Angeles—who lost their homes in the recent wildfires—rebuild faster,” Montazeri says.

Although she has been designing complex projects for 14 years and has a deep understanding of architecture, Montazeri says understanding city codes can be challenging. “But the way Archistar’s eCheck platform presents them makes the process much easier to understand, even for someone who has just graduated.”

Speaking of which, just last month, she and her team helped trained two recent graduates from Woodbury University in Burbank, CA, Spencer Sprotte and Johline Yao.

Meanwhile, Bixuan Zhang, who received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California last year and interned at architecture and engineering firms in China and the US (i.e. Arup), joined earlier this year.

Then there’s Jacob Pajer, a recent B.Arch graduate from Cal Poly Pomona who brought hands-on experience in residential and commercial drafting through his internships with Bonomo Development and PW&C Architects.

And rounding out the team is Angel Morales, who holds a BFA in Interior Architecture from California State University in Sacramento, CA, with a background in computer science.

In addition to the LA team and office in Culver City (in LA county), Archistar has offices in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, BC, and it will soon open an office in Austin, TX. But the tech teams in each location face unique challenges.

In Los Angeles, because the partnership with the City and County of LA is focused on rebuilding homes that perished in the fires, there can be some complex details in like-for-like designs. (Like-for-like plans can’t increase the floor area, size, height, or building footprint by more than 10% of the original house.)

One issue is that most of the homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades were built before computer-aided design (CAD) was invented, so many original designs were hand-drawn.

“We can’t always make the height of a like-for-like house exactly the same as the old house because it burned down, and we don’t necessarily know the original height,” Montazeri says. “If we don’t have a history of permits on the lot, we use GIS height.”

But even with constraints and challenges of like-for-like plans, Montazeri has seen some interesting trends and improvements in the new designs. “In the old design, there used to be a smaller kitchen, but now it’s more open,” she says. “The style of the house is the same, but it’s more modern in the floor plan, and the layout is more connected to the backyard. And we are seeing more walls and hardscapes outside—compared to greenery—to protect the house from future fires.”

Since mid-July, Montazeri and the rest of the tech team have processed nearly 200 plan submissions. In that time, eCheck has tracked up to 30 different categories of checks for each plan, reviewing hundreds of details and pulling data from city codes, GIS, and the architectural set.

Meanwhile, Archistar’s “humans in the loop” check the AI platform’s work, considering both architectural and technical parameters. Ultimately, each plan goes through three human reviews before City or County planners see it, which speeds up the process considerably and makes municipal plan reviewers’ jobs easier.

It’s possible for a tech team member to process a passing eCheck report in six hours. If there’s an architectural question, Montazeri will review the set to resolve it. And when there are technical questions, she’ll engage the tech team in Sydney. But she says the City or County will have a report with the eCheck results in less than a week.

The best part of the process is that eCheck can spot pass/fail trends, which informs the architects, techs, and cities involved in the review process. For example, sometimes the way the code itself is written may be causing confusion for architects, which can lead to cities making revisions or exemptions to the code.

“For architects and cities working with us for a long time, they can get better and faster results because they know which details are important, and everyone can learn,” Montazeri says.

But most importantly, every fire survivor who lost a home can get back to rebuilding their lives faster.