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 Marquette, 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.
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. A Chemosphere copy is used as the set for Current TV.
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.
