Keeping his eye on earth and sky

FEW GRASPED how John Lautner used architecture to embrace the natural world.

He opened a Sunset Boulevard diner to the sky and was dismayed to see it become a symbol of “Googie” Atomic Age design. His flying saucer-shaped Chemosphere residence, conceived to immerse residents in sweeping mountain and city views, became emblematic of the bachelor-pad Hollywood Modernism he rejected. Movies sensationalized his creations as James Bond-style backdrops for sex machines and lethally bored rich kids.

Yet Lautner knew that Los Angeles, with its unfettered dreamers, schemers, experimenters and individualists, was the only place his visionary architectural drawings could become realities.

“Dream House or Nightmare?” a Norman Rockwell-era Saturday Evening Post asked of Silvertop, a Silver Lake Lautner residence seemingly poised to “zoom off to Mars.”

Lautner did aim for altitude. One day in 1963, he walked out onto a Bel-Air cliff-top construction site and stood so perilously close to the edge that he was in danger of falling prey to a stray gust, to gravity itself. Yet he was calm, meditating on skyline and cityscape, like a stone angel on the parapet of a European opera house reaching for the gods. He seemed to embody his contention that “the purpose of architecture is to create timeless, free, joyous spaces for all activities in life.”

“Between Earth and Heaven,” opening today at the Hammer Museum, traces Lautner’s lifelong quest to transcend the boundaries between shelter and nature. It also attempts to redefine the legacy of a seminal architectural pioneer so profoundly misunderstood that it took the exhibition’s co-curator, Nicholas Olsberg, three months to decide whether to get involved at all.

“I thought it was very difficult,” Olsberg says. “The work had been misrepresented for so long, as sensational Space Age-ism, as Hollywood glamour. It was burdened with all these myths: It was vulgar, it was crass, it was drama, it was spectacle.

“But it wasn’t about that. It was about trying to establish this transcendent relationship between man and his environment,” Olsberg says. “You have this enormous man looking at the vastness of the world. It’s the contradiction of being secure on the ground but your head is flying.

“My hesitancy was: Could we manage to remove it from its perception?” he says. “I finally said yes.”

Ann Philbin, the adventurous director of the Hammer, says the genesis of the exhibition goes back to her arrival in Los Angeles nine years ago, when she discovered Lautner to be “hugely deserving and overlooked” and “underrepresented in the pantheon of 20th century architecture.”

Philbin credits Lautner with “moving away from the cool, the functional and the rational tenets of Modernism toward something more sensual and transcendent. . . . I don’t think it is too large a claim, in fact, to say that he is the link between Modernist architects like Neutra and Schindler and architects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.”

Views from on high

ON A recent day at the Hammer, co-curator Frank Escher, of Escher GuneWardena Architecture, stood amid wooden crates as workmen delicately placed the elliptical top of a model of the mushroom-like Chemosphere on its podium.

Viewers must understand, Escher said, that as intriguing as Lautner houses seem from the outside, “they’re designed as observatories.”

“The whole idea is giving you a sheltered place to look out onto nature,” said Escher, whose Clark Kent glasses do little to disguise his passionate intensity.

Escher got to know Lautner when he worked on the restoration of the Chemosphere. It is one of 16 buildings, six of them unusually large-scale models, that appear in the exhibition.

“Lautner used the space to connect to the landscape,” Escher said. “It didn’t matter if it was a tiny mountain cabin or it overlooked Acapulco Bay. Lautner brought the landscape in. He pushed architecture in a new direction in the second half of the 20th century.”

Lautner loved to hate Los Angeles. He once said the city was “so ugly it made me physically sick.”

Yet “he understood this was the only place he could develop his work,” Escher said. “He knew that yes, this was an ugly city. But there was this incredible richness of utopian, intellectual, interesting people, as open to invention as he was. He would not have been able to do this without his clients.”

One was a 27-year-old aerospace engineer, Leonard Malin. Lautner climbed Malin’s “virtually impossible-precipitous-hillside” day and night, sitting in the scrub for hours, watching the light change and the city lights emerge from the darkness, Malin recalled in a tribute issue of the Journal of the Taliesin Fellows of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Lautner was collaborative, in a way today’s ego-fed celebrity “starchitects” might not comprehend. Malin chose the house Lautner eventually built from four designs. He dubbed the floating “hemispherical” home the “Chemosphere,” after the “space-age” bonding and sealing compounds of Chem-Seal Corp. that were used in its construction.

One of Malin’s colleagues, aerospace engineer Douglas Walstrom, visited the Chemosphere with his wife, Octavia, whom he had met when they both worked at NASA. She was blown away. Sitting in the Chemosphere, “you looked out over the mountains and experienced a very unique feeling,” she says.

The Walstroms had a steep half-acre in Beverly Glen. The 6-foot-4 Lautner scrambled up their hillside and “just stood there and looked at the mountains and smiled,” she says. “He was a great nature lover.”

Lautner showed the Walstroms three designs and told them to go with their gut feeling. The multi-level cabin they picked encountered so much official resistance that Octavia Walstrom finally demanded the permit herself.

Her reward, in 1969, was a utopian 1,400-square-foot haven with a central ceiling that soared 18 feet, stairs that seemed to float, and glass walls and passageways that wrapped the woodlands around and even under the house.

“We looked to the mountains and the trees,” she says. “It was just like being in the woods. The deer came right up to the house. You’re just part of nature and everything around you.”

Now she’s 90, and the place is pristine, thanks to a meticulous attention to engineering designed to withstand a magnitude-8 earthquake. She’s still channeling the cabin’s metaphysical bond with nature.

“We have coyotes coming around,” she says. “Raccoons chewed up my water hose a couple of nights ago, so I put out a big pan of water for them.”

Walstrom doubts that wealthy people buying up Lautner houses today as trophy homes, vacation places and party pads experience them as Lautner envisioned. But she appreciates efforts to restore their original integrity.

“Credit is due to the trophy people because they do have the money to take off the damage,” she says. “Some people just can’t leave a good design alone.

“He was an absolute genius, and the irony is he never made much money while he was alive.”

Nature concepts came early

LAUTNER’S linkage of architecture to the natural world began in his childhood in the lakeside woodlands of Marquette, Mich. He was born July 16, 1911, into a hothouse of bohemian intellectual romanticism.

His German-born father, John, taught college philosophy and introduced Lautner to Nietzsche and Kant and to George Santayana’s belief in harmony with the environment. His mother, Cathleen, an artist influenced by Gauguin, the Fauvists and Nordic myth, took the name Vida.

At a time when people still believed in the power of a home to shape character, even destiny, Lautner and his family built a mystical second home on Lake Superior. Lautner laid floors and raised beams for the log-framed roof. His mother studied Norwegian folk architecture to create a “Norse cabin” she called “Midgaard,” envisioning its architecture as summoning a mystical realm, as she said, “midway between earth and heaven.”

This view of a house as a bridge to the natural world endured for the rest of Lautner’s life.

In the early 1930s, he and his first wife, Mary Roberts, enrolled in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship. Lautner evolved from Wright apprentice to collaborator, and the relationship continued when Lautner moved to Los Angeles in 1938.

Lautner built his own house in 1940 at the top of the roller-coaster Micheltorena hill in Silver Lake and had four children. He opened an architectural firm and fell in love with the wife of a partner, Elizabeth Honnold, soon his second wife.

Misperception dogged him early. He designed a Googie’s diner at Sunset and Crescent Heights in 1947 with a high glass front so patrons could experience the vast sky, and “he was treated as if he had created Denny’s,” says his daughter Judith Lautner, who worked with her father for seven years. But that perception “was the opposite of everything he stood for. He did what he did at Googie’s to bring the outside in.”

“The Googie debacle was essentially a betrayal,” the Hammer’s Philbin wrote in an e-mail. “Two East Coast critics said they admired it, then [Lautner] found it published as a caution and a warning -- an example of the sort of Movieland exuberance that good Modernists should eschew.”

The Bond house

LAUTNER found a respite among postwar middle-class clients -- aerospace workers, doctors, even a descendant of Tolstoy -- who fueled a boom in the unique residential architecture that is often a refuge for cutting-edge architects.

Lautner built the Pearlman mountain cabin in Idyllwild in 1957, with huge pleated front windows overlooking the majestic forest. The 1968 Elrod residence, in Palm Springs, captured the cosmic drama of the desert with an approach that some admirers liken to a pavilion -- though this nuance was probably lost on people who watched James Bond wrestle there in “Diamonds Are Forever” with a couple of scantily clad knockout bodyguards named Bambi and Thumper, in a vivid illustration of the dichotomy between Lautner’s intentions and his image.

Usually, “architecture is designed to look at the house,” curator Olsberg said. “He used architecture to frame what you see outside it. It’s a metaphysical relationship . . . the idea that you’re related to the sky and the horizon and the trees.”

In the exhibition (partially sponsored by Tribune Co. chief Sam Zell, an owner of a Lautner home whose wife, Helen, is a new member of the Hammer board), designers have used films and photographs to create what curator Escher calls “archipelagoes” -- visual islands where visitors can look through the models and viscerally experience the stunning forests and mountain settings.

By the late 1960s, Lautner was a charismatic magnet. Andreas Simoncelli, of Rome, improved his English by listening to Lautner’s percussive delivery of his favorite words -- “Human, Strong, Free, People, Real Beauty, Light, Wind, Sun” -- and habitual platitudes, such as “You’re wasting your time if you don’t know how to hold up the roof!” Simoncelli said in the Taliesin journal tribute.

In those heady days, “ ‘Impossible, can’t be done, can’t find it’ and such, were synonyms of incompetence, lack of will,” former associate Helena Arahuete recalled for Taliesin.

During this buoyant era, Lautner built the 1973 Marbrisa residence in Acapulco. The summit of the house evoked a spectacular mountaintop, and an infinity moat surrounding it appeared to merge with the bay far below, transporting inhabitants to a dimension that truly seemed suspended somewhere between Earth and heaven.

It was the majestic prelude to a lot of disappointment as the U.S. economy slowed.

Lautner designed a 1979 Palm Springs place for Bob Hope that was originally shaped like the skirts of a volcano. But Hope “made life hell for my father,” Judith Lautner says. “He destroyed a lot of the thinking. He just stepped in and said ‘No, no, no.’ ”

Lautner’s 1979 Segel residence in Malibu was one of his more peaceful later experiences, curator Escher says. The wavy, wafer-shaped roof floated above the house, dramatically framing the dunes and ocean.

But many of the structures pictured in the brilliant drawings displayed at the Hammer were never built. Lautner designed a pool cradled in a womb-like hill, like a lagoon in a volcanic crater, for jazz legend Miles Davis. Then Davis died.

Public commissions were scarce. No one begged this talented maverick to design a Walt Disney Concert Hall.

He got older, angrier. Fire robbed him of the home he shared with Elizabeth. Elizabeth died, robbing him of his soul mate. Painful peripheral neuropathy put him in a wheelchair. He died on Oct. 24, 1994, at 83, leaving a widow, Francisca, his onetime housekeeper, who spoke as little English as he spoke Spanish.

Today, though, the greatest victims of the civic neglect he suffered are Angelenos themselves. His cultists are forced to turn to movies -- “The Big Lebowski,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Less Than Zero,” “Body Double” -- that use Lautner architecture to convey the expansive futurism that is Los Angeles’ eternal conceit.

At the fringes of this fictional appreciation is his last remaining Los Angeles building completely open to the public: the Beachwood Market.

The stripped-down relic gives few clues of the soaring heights Lautner scaled.

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anne-marie.oconnor@latimes.com

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‘Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner’

Where: Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 12

Price: $5

Contact: (310) 443-7000 or www.hammer.ucla.edu

Also

What: Tour of the Sheats/Goldstein residence

When: Aug. 24, Oct. 12

Price: $55