John Lautner (architect)
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John Lautner (16 July 1911 – 24 October 1994), influential American architect whose work in Southern California combines progressive engineering with humane design and dramatic space-age flair.
Lautner was born in rural Michigan and attended Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship for six years in the 1930s as architectural training, serving as construction manager on Wright's Johnson residence "Wingspread" and on two projects in Los Angeles. He stands among the most successful of Taliesin graduates.
Lautner established his own office in Southern California in 1940 and produced a long series of houses that combine innovative engineering, superb handling of materials, respect for his clients' needs, and an experimental vision that remains perpetually fresh. The living room of his Carling Residence, for instance, was built to rotate on a turntable and become an outdoor patio. The Reiner Residence called Silvertop in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California contains entire glass walls that silently disappear with the touch of a button. His design solutions may appear to be grandstanding at first, but they derive from logic, originality, and technical daring.
His own first residence (1940) was built on a hillside. By choice or by accident, Lautner developed a reputation for making the most of challenging locations. The Malin Residence (the Chemosphere, 1960), is the extreme example. The client was a young engineer with limited resources and access to a site with a priceless view of the San Fernando Valley, but worthless because of its severe slope. Lautner's radical solution was to propose an octagonal, saucer-shaped structure entirely supported by a central stem five feet in diameter. Working with the client's own participation, and with materials donated from companies eager to be associated with the project, Lautner took an otherwise-unbuildable slope and created a house with incredibly sweeping views. The Chemosphere has become a Los Angeles landmark that conveys both hope and folly. It was used in Brian De Palma's film Body Double, and also appears in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In 2000 German publisher Benedikt Taschen purchased and restored the house With Architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena.
Although mostly known for residences, Lautner created an entire genre of commercial architecture: Googie. With the 1949 design for Googie's Coffee Shop at the corner of Sunset Strip and Crescent Heights, Lautner's logical yet space-age sensibility, colliding with the client's requirements, produced a building with expansive glass walls, arresting form, and exuberant signage oriented to car traffic: an advertisement for itself. It became part of the American postwar Zeitgeist. Other chains such as Tiny Naylor's, Ship's, Norm's and Clock's quickly imitated the look, which proves its commercial value.
"Googie" was labelled as such in a 1952 magazine article by Yale University professor Douglas Haskell. Although the genre still has its admirers, in the 1950s the architectural community ridiculed it as superficial and vulgar. Not until Robert Venturi's 1972 book "Learning from Las Vegas" did the architectural mainstream even come close to validating Lautner's logic. Lautner's reputation suffered as a result. Following some lean years in the 1950s and 1960s, he enjoyed something of a resurgence with his poured-concrete houses in the 1970s, notably the Bob Hope Residence and other houses in Palm Springs.
Among Lautner's other works include the Arango Residence in Acapulco, Mexico with its concrete sky-moat, and the landmark Desert Hot Springs Motel in Palm Springs. His dramatic and photogenic spaces are frequently exploited in films, notably the Palm Springs Elrod Residence used to good effect in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.
One of the few Lautner buildings regularly open to the general public is the Desert Hot Springs Motel. [1] restored in 2001.
