BEYOND FLASH & FANTASY
John Lautner's 'keeping it real' approach to architecture
-- visionary yet down-to-earth, space age yet eternal

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

In a house designed by Southern California architect John Lautner, an entire wall may swing open on hinges to let in the view. Roofs sweep up, then down, in freeform fashion. His flying saucer-like Chemosphere house seems to hover in the Hollywood Hills. In a Lautner house, you'll rarely enter a rectangular room. "I love lakes and mountains," he once said, "and none of them are square."

No wonder there are legends about Lautner (1911-1994), and how unfortunate. "He became famous for all the wrong reasons," Nicholas Olsberg writes in 'Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner.' The book, which Olsberg edited, accompanied a recent exhibition of the same name at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Both were designed to bring Lautner his due.

Although Lautner won praise in the architectural and popular press right after World War II for innovative Los Angeles homes that were seen as models for the future, his work was later attacked as flash and fantasy, and Lautner himself regarded as an egotistical crank.

It didn't help that Lautner took offense, scorned the architectural press, and delivered jeremiads about the city where he lived and worked. "...when I came down here and drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, it was so goddamn ugly I was physically sick for about a year," he told oral historian Maggie Valentine, who interviewed him in 1994 for the Frank Lloyd Wright Design Heritage Project of the Frank Lloyd Wright Oral History Program at UCLA. He also disdained the people he had to work with in Los Angeles. "All they care about is money," he groused to Valentine. "Speculation. Dirty, cheating bastards, that's what they are."

And this is from the man whose swooping, 1949 glass-and-steel design for Googie's coffee shop helped shape Los Angeles' greatest gift to roadside commercial architecture in America, and gave the style its name.

Lautner often used the word 'real' to mean architecture that was authentic, creative, new -- yet tied to ancient and timeless ways of building; based on the needs -- including emotional needs -- of his clients, and the demands of the site.

To Lautner, 'real' meant the opposite of everything he thought Los Angeles stood for -- shallow, shoddy, and designed for quick sale. "People say 'why don't you move?'" he told Marlene L. Laskey in 1982 for 'Responsibility, Infinity, Nature,' for the Oral History Program of the University of California, Los Angeles. "But I don't know where to go because it's affecting the entire world."

"A whole, legitimate piece of architecture is a whole idea and a valid idea and a new idea for every situation," Lautner told Laskey. "It's not just following a style or a fad..."

Lautner was a structural pioneer, working with engineers like Edgardo Contini and T.Y. Lin to design truss-roofed homes, mushroom-like homes (like the Chemosphere), and thin-shelled, biomorphic homes of reinforced concrete.

Lautner, who sometimes spent days on a site before deriving the governing idea that would rule the house from general plan to each detail, once called himself "part psychiatrist, part metaphysician."

The Chemosphere house (the name came from a chemical company that donated sealants in exchange for free publicity), Lautner called "sensible," not "sensational." He saw the Chemosphere as a prototype for prefabricated middle class housing. He even drew up plans for a hillside filled with Chemospheres -- one of several times in his 60-plus-year career that saw him designing housing tracts that never got built. Another, Alto Capistrano, planned for a community of 10,000 people near San Juan Capistrano, included pools, parks, light industry, apartments and townhouses, and cliff-side homes reached via 'hill elevators.'

"I think his greatest frustration was he got to build individual works within the landscape when he wanted, like Wright, to transform the whole space," Olsberg said.

Lautner's houses have proven to be practical and comfortable. "It's actually pretty easy to live in," said Mark Haddawy, who lives in Lautner's Harpel house. Haddawy had previously lived in a Pierre Koenig home that pleased neither him nor his pet. "My cat kept trying to escape," he said, adding, "From the moment we've gotten here, she's never once tried to bolt."

The Harpel house, from 1956, is a single-story pavilion, its freeform roof supported by concrete columns both inside the house and out, where the roof continues as a trellis. The house sits just below the Chemosphere, whose original owner, engineer Leonard Malin, decided to hire Lautner after watching the Harpel house being built.

The Chemosphere is a delight, said Lauren Taschen, who lives there with her husband Benedikt. "It feels like being a little kid up here, living in a big tree," she said. The house, on what Lautner had called an "impossibly" steep slope, is reached by a funicular. Though it's a structural wonder, an octagonal pod held up by a basket of steel beams resting on a reinforced concrete pier, the effect inside is warm, thanks to a stone wall and built-in seating around the fireplace.

The house, with an open living area and a bedroom tucked into one corner, is only 2,200 square feet. When Frank Escher, the architect who renovated the house for the Taschens, took the late filmmaker Billy Wilder and his wife Audrey on a tour, he recalls, "She looked up at the house and said, 'This is a cottage!' "

James Goldstein, one of Lautner's best and longest-lasting clients, demolishes another Lautner legend: "He had no ego problem whatsoever."

"He was very rebellious, against the ways of society, against the restrictions that were placed upon him by building rules, by financial institutions that wouldn't make loans on things he had designed because they weren't understandable to the lender," Goldstein said.

But when it came to the project at hand, Goldstein's 30-plus-year effort to "continue creating" the Sheats-Goldstein house, "Lautner would always defer to me. Every new project has been my suggestion. He never said, 'Jim, I think we should do this. What about doing that?' He never said that kind of thing."

The Sheats-Goldstein house, originally designed in 1963 for Helen and Paul Sheats, is one of Lautner's great works. A dramatically folded roof of coffered concrete shelters glass-walled, woodsy rooms. Living there, Olsberg writes, is "like living in the folds of origami, with a carefully framed prospect that stretched forever."

Goldstein, a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright since childhood, was knocked out by the home when he first saw it -- despite some injudicious changes. Each coffer in the coffered ceiling, for example, had been painted a different color.

"I love the clean lines, the inside-outside continuity, the way everything blends in with nature, the use of natural elements, the ability to enhance the view," Goldstein said. "Many people have said to me that I was his perfect client. Budgetary considerations were never a factor. It was, 'How can it be done to achieve the utmost perfection?'"

Lautner grew up on Lake Superior, in the forests of upper Michigan, in what he described to Valentine as a "philosophical nature environment." His mother Vida designed an Arts and Crafts log cabin above the lake. Lautner, who was 12, and his father, John, a professor who had studied in Heidelberg and Paris, built it by hand, felling the trees and using winches and windlasses to move logs uphill.

Lautner valued craftsmanship highly -- its lack was another reason he came to despise modern America -- and often worked with expert builders like John de la Vauz or Wally Niewiadowski. "Good client, good architect, and good builder," he told Laskey. "That's all you need. But that very seldom happens."

Lautner married young and well to a woman whose "grandfather owned half of northern Michigan," he told Valentine. Soon John and Marybud Lautner were living with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen in Wisconsin. During his apprenticeship Lautner did everything, with a particular emphasis on steamfitting. He stayed with Wright for 11 years, working with him on his plan for the prototype Broadacre City, and on prototypes for what Wright called "the modest house."

It was Wright who dispatched Lautner to Los Angeles, where they worked together on several homes. By the early 1940s Lautner was working on his own, though he would continue to partner with Wright when the master called. And when Wright visited town, Lautner would always happily chauffeur him around.

After World War II, Lautner joined the firm of Doug Honnold, a successful and eclectic architect who got involved in the Mutual Housing Association's plans for cooperative housing in Crestwood Hills in the Los Angeles hills. Lautner originally worked on that project, which also involved architect A. Quincy Jones. But in 1947 Lautner departed the project, and the firm, when he took up with Honnold's wife, Elizabeth, whom he married after divorcing Marybud.

What followed was what Olsberg characterizes as the first of several boom periods for Lautner -- all were followed by busts. By 1951, Olsberg said, Lautner was almost broke.

The architect's second fertile period, from 1956 to 1963, explored what Olsberg calls the "poetry of poured concrete." Notable works included Silvertop (1956), with its amazing pair of reinforced concrete truss roofs.

Lautner's third great period, which Olsberg dates from 1968 to 1973, showed a "revolutionary fluidity in planning and shaping space."

The Elrod house (1968), designed for interior designer Arthur Elrod in Palm Springs, features a dome-like ceiling of reinforced concrete that floats apparently unaided above a circular seating area and a mountain of boulders that protrudes through the floor.

The rock outcroppings, which also serve as walls, originally sat below the home's designated pad. Lautner convinced Elrod to excavate the site so the home could be built among the rocks. "I decided we'd do something that really suited the desert," Lautner told Laskey, comparing the house to "a desert flower."

From the 1960s on, Olsberg writes, Lautner "pushed against so many barriers that (his works) were checkered by compromise or outright cancellation." But he had many successes.

The Walstrom house, built in 1969 on a steep canyon slope shaded by oaks, is a woodsy throwback to Lautner's earlier work -- and thus a good fit for its setting. Visitors reach the house by taking a walkway that switchbacks up the hill like a mountain trail, switchbacks again as it enters the house, and again as it ramps up into the living room.

The Walstrom house is all diagonals. The house itself is shaped like an arrow, as it floats over its site, anchored to the hill with steel girders. The wooden siding and cabinetry are angled, as is the loft that juts out over the living room. "From the carpentry to the cabinetry, every element follows the same logic," Escher said.

Architect Duncan Nicholson, who won a job with Lautner in 1989, after five years trying, found a man who was completely without airs but impressive nonetheless. "He was over six feet himself. He was big, broad," Nicholson said. "His hands were huge. He had a larger-than-life portrait of himself in the office behind him. It seemed like there were two of him in the office, as though one weren't enough."

Lautner was humorous and an enjoyable conversationalist. He'd take his staff to lunch at Musson & Frank, a legendary Hollywood eatery, and gave Christmas parties at his apartment two blocks from his Hollywood studio.

The apartment was filled with Lautner's collections, toys, a life-sized papier-mache Asian tiger with a wicked grin, paintings by his mother, books, and jazz records. Lautner enjoyed travel and photography, watched Michigan play football on TV, and after work would often stop by a local bar where his cronies, shoe salesmen, plumbers, "not architects, regular guys," would always have a seat for him, Nicholson remembers.

Ill with a form of neuropathy that restricted his movements, Lautner worked almost to the very end. "Thinking about architecture and solving problems, being creative and being original made him feel better," Nicholson said.

Early on, Nicholson ventured to ask Lautner, "How do you do it? Where does it come from?"

"He said when he was young, he didn't know if he could do it," Nicholson said. "It takes a lot of hard work, he said, a lot of perseverance. You know so much about building, and human experience. At a certain point it just begins to happen because you will it to."

Loving their Lautners A John Lautner house may be a life-affirming place to live, but it can be tough to keep up. "They're incredibly difficult to maintain," said John McIlwee, who lives in Lautner's Garcia house, a poem in poured concrete from 1962. "We have to re-scaffold the whole front of the house to fix a window because there's no way to reach it." The good news, according to Ann Philbin, the Hammer Museum's director, is that most owners of the 45 or so Lautner homes in and around Los Angeles are "all very serious about owning these homes, and have the will, inclination, and resources to take care of them." McIlwee and his partner, Bill Damaschke, are among the heroes who have restored their Lautner homes. Their house, with a roof that swoops to control strong sunlight, "was ruined when we bought it" in 2002, McIlwee said. "It's perfect now." The firm Marmol Radziner handled the renovation. "The best thing we did," McIlwee said, "was live in the house a year before doing any work. Throughout the year, the sun has different positions, and with the glass and swooping roof, it changes the whole perspective." "The living room is so crazy because during the day, you feel like you're outside," McIlwee said. "Then at night, the windows go black and you feel like you're inside again. The best is twilight time, when the sky turns a cobalt blue and the whole room radiates that blue. It's absolutely insane." Mark Haddawy restored Lautner's Harpel house without using an architect. "I just followed the existing blueprint," he said. "I didn't reinterpret anything. I took away everything that had been changed." It was a challenging job because the house had gotten a second story addition -- which he removed. "It would have been great to have the space but I understood there was no way," Haddway said. "The second story looked like an apartment from Studio City had landed on the roof." Frank Escher, co-curator of the Lautner exhibit, was architect for the restoration of the Chemosphere. "The house had several owners," he said, "and they all did terrible things to the house." Rather than a pure restoration, Escher made several improvements, including replacing mullioned glass windows with frameless glass for an unbroken view. "Lautner always felt a house should adapt," Escher said. "It should change with the owner. But of course it has to be the right owner. I think of his houses as custom-fit clothing."

The photographers

The Eichler Network handpicked this article's impressive spread of Lautner house photos, represented by the roster of accomplished photographers below.

Additional photography: Ramona Trent (courtesy Escher GuneWardena Architecture, Inc.)

Photo source credits: Joshua White photos courtesy Hammer Museum; Alan Weintraub photos courtesy Arcaid; Ken Hively photo courtesy Los Angeles Times; John Lautner portrait courtesy John Lautner Archive, Research Library, Getty Research Institute; Julius Shulman photo courtesy Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library, Getty Research Institute