Remembering John Lautner

Before Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne developed a new architectural language, there was John Lautner, who apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright, came to Los Angeles in 1938 and practiced here until his death in 1994 at age 83. Like R.M. Schindler, another protege of Wright, he struggled all his life to win recognition and realize his vision. In his early years Lautner designed the eye-catching Googie’s on the Sunset Strip, among other coffee shops, but his prime focus was always the house.

And what houses they are. Each is one of a kind, and several have achieved iconic status. Lautner never repeated himself, though his signature is unmistakable. He labored nine years to create Silvertop, challenging the building department to accept his daring spans, a wall of glass, a cantilevered driveway and one of the city’s first infinity pools.

Everyone has seen pictures of the Chemosphere, a saucer atop a concrete stalk, or remembers it from the Brian De Palma movie “Body Double.” Created in 1960 for a young aerospace engineer and reached by a funicular, its canted windows provide a 360-degree view of the Hollywood Hills and the San Fernando Valley.

In the Sheats/Goldstein house, built in 1963 in Beverly Hills, natural light sparkles through 750 old-fashioned glasses inset into the soaring concrete sail over the living room. Thirty years later, a new owner, Jim Goldstein, commissioned Lautner to design sliding glass walls for the cantilevered wedge of his bedroom. In Palm Springs, he created a huge “doughnut” for Bob Hope and a domed showcase for interior designer Arthur Elrod in which petals of concrete embrace skylights in the huge circular living room, and the pool terrace seems to jut out over the city lights.

I was lucky enough to see the Elrod house in 1968 just before it was a cover story in the Los Angeles Times Home magazine. I had flown from London to meet Lautner, and because he had very little new work, he took the time to show me Silvertop. He also brought me to the Wolff house above the Sunset Strip and to the modest wood house he had designed for himself in Silver Lake in 1940. Coming from Britain, where Brutalism was the current vogue, I was swept away by the gravity-defying vaults and the lyrical beauty of his forms.

Three years later I was back in L.A. interviewing Lautner for NPR in his studio on Hollywood Boulevard. It was the morning of the San Fernando earthquake, which had jolted everyone out of bed at 6 a.m. and littered the streets with chunks of stucco. Our conversation was interrupted a dozen times by telephone calls from clients who wanted to tell him that their houses and the expansive windows had survived unscathed. He received these reports with quiet satisfaction, knowing what the building department often doubted--that his buildings were firmly rooted in their sites and designed to withstand natural shocks.

Lautner pushed the limits of engineering and technology. Other modern architects looked to Europe and the recent past for inspiration; he gazed into the future and into the vibrant present of an all-American city. He caught the adventurous spirit of Wright without aping the master, as many proteges did. His vision was clear and idealistic. “The purpose of Architecture is to ... create timeless, free, joyous spaces for all the activities in life,” he declared in the foreword to a monograph that appeared soon after his death. “What is commonly known as Architecture are styles--Greek, Colonial, French, English, Modern, etc. These are known merchandise that Bankers will finance and Real Estate sell.”

A feisty individualist, Lautner never compromised his principles or tempered his outspoken opinions. Shortly after he arrived in L.A., he drove down Santa Monica Boulevard--which was then the tail end of Route 66--and was appalled by the ugliness, which made him physically sick. But he stayed because he realized, like Schindler before him and Gehry since, that a booming metropolis has fewer constraints on originality and had to include a few exceptional clients. Jobs were spasmodic, and his clients’ ambitions often outran their budgets, but he was able to create a more adventurous body of work amid the visual chaos of Southern California than he could have in a more refined or orderly environment.

For six decades Lautner was ignored by the pundits of taste and even by John Entenza, the influential editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, who commissioned Case Study houses from orthodox Modernists in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Orson Welles, Lautner was an underemployed maverick, living hand-to-mouth because his work was falsely labeled as extravagant and his artistry challenged the conventions. Boxes were for dog kennels and jails, he insisted, and the smallest of his houses encourages you to stretch your arms wide and breathe deeply. “The infinite variety of these spaces can be as varied as life itself,” he wrote, “and they must be as sensible as nature in deriving from a main idea and flowering into a beautiful entity.”

Happily, most of Lautner’s houses have been cherished by devoted owners, or restored by converts to his brave new world. The 1950 Harvey house in the Hollywood Hills was decrepit and obscured by new construction when Mitch Glazer and Kelly Lynch chanced upon it and embarked on a long and loving restoration. Now the spaces flow freely around the central hub of the living room, and the rich woods and marble have a burnished glow, just as the architect intended. Marmol Radziner and Associates has just put its final polish on the rainbow-shaped Garcia house, built in 1962 on Mulholland Drive, and Escher GuneWardena has restored the Chemosphere for publisher Benedikt Taschen, removing the clutter of unsympathetic additions.

You don’t have to buy a Lautner house to experience the joy of living in one. You can rent Elrod’s pleasure dome in Palm Springs and imagine that you are James Bond confronting the villain’s lethal sidekicks in “Diamonds are Forever.” Or you can share the cost with a group of friends (the house has five bedrooms) and toast the master from the terrace as the sun dips behind the mountains.

For rental information, go to www.timeandplace.com.