Architecture and Influence
John Lautner designed over 200 architectural projects during his career, but many designs for larger buildings were never realised. In the architectural press his extant body of work has been dominated by his domestic commissions; although he designed numerous commercial buildings including Googie's, Coffee Dan's and Henry's restaurants, the Beachwood Market, Desert Hot Springs Motel, and the Lincoln Mercury Showroom in Glendale, sadly, several of these buildings have since been demolished. With a handful of exceptions (e.g. the Arango Residence in Acapulco, the Turner House in Aspen, Colorado, the Harpel House #2 in Anchorage, Alaska, the Ernest Lautner house in Pensacola, Florida) nearly all of Lautner's extant buildings are in California, mostly in and around Los Angeles.
His distinctive application of the principles of Organic Architecture was, of course, profoundly influenced by his apprenticeship under Frank Lloyd Wright. Speaking of his time at Taliesin, he recalled:
| “ | ... Mr. Wright was around all the time pointing out things that contributed to the beauty of the space, or the building, or the function of the kitchen, or the dining room, or what-have-you. And also the details of construction: how a certain way of detailing, which he would call grammar, contributed to the whole idea, the whole, the total expression. And then he kept accenting the idea that there wasn't any real architecture unless you had a whole idea ... So I really learned that you have to have a major total idea or it's nothing, you know; it's just an assembly. What most people do is an assembly of cliches or facades or what-have-you ... | ” |
Throughout his life Lautner was a passionate admirer of his mentor (to whom he typically referred as "Mr. Wright") and he remained a dedicated practitioner of Organic Architecture. His oral history interviews reveal that he had little regard for the International Style and its leading architects:
| “ | None of them had anything like Frank Lloyd Wright ... I actually heard in person Gropius, Corbusier, van der Rohe, and all of the big ones. And they're nothing compared to Frank Lloyd Wright. They're just nothing. So when people want to discuss it with me, it's just crazy, that's all. | ” |
Nevertheless, even during the time he worked under Wright, Lautner sought to established his own individual and distinctive style:
| “ | ... I purposely didn't copy any of Mr. Wright's drawings or even take any photographs because I was a purist. I was idealist. I was going to work from my own philosophy, and that's what he wanted apprentices to do, too: that wherever they went, they would contribute to the infinite variety of nature by being individual, creating for individuals a growing, changing thing. Well practically none of them were able to do it. I mean, I am one of two or three that may have done it, you know ... | ” |
Although his earlier works not surprisingly displayed some of the influence of his mentor, Lautner gradually developed his own style and consciously avoided anything that could be classified as "Wright-influenced". An exception among his later commissions to this was the Wolff House in West Hollywood (1963) which was often cited by his critics as a "Wrightian" building, much to his chagrin, but as he explained in 1986:
| “ | Yeah, that's what they have to grab on . And that's a pain in the neck too, because the reason it is, is because the client, Wolff, asked for that. He wanted a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of house, and so I had to respect his request as a client. And that's the first and only time I did anything similar . And immediately everybody recognized it, and they think it's my best work, when it's the easiest. I could do those any time of the day or night. I could do a Frank Lloyd Wright house, but doing my own are more original. | ” |
Lautner's approach to architecture embodied many of Wright's philosophies and preoccupations, above all, the notion of a building as a "total concept". Like Wright, his work also shows a strong preoccupation with essential geometric forms — the circle and the triangle are dominant motifs in both his overall designs and his detailing — and his houses are similarly rooted in the idea of integrating the house into its location and creating an organic flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, although Lautner's work arguably took the latter concept to even greater heights.
Another point of similarity is that, like Wright, many of Lautner's houses were sited in elevated locations or "difficult" sites — hillsides or seashores — and were expressly designed to take full advantage of the vistas these sites offered; he also followed Wright's dictum of building on a slope rather than on the very top of a hill.
Lautner's work is especially significant for its radical expansion of both the technical and spatial vocabulary of domestic architecture. He achieved this through his use of the latest building technologies and materials, e.g., his pioneering use of glue-laminated plywood beams, steel beams and sheeting, and especially his ongoing exploration of the architectural possibilities of reinforced and prestressed concrete — and through his use of non-linear, open-plan and multi-level layouts, shaped and folded concrete forms, skylights and light-wells and panoramic expanses of plate glass. Another key characteristic of Lautner's architecture is his heterogeneous approach, not only in his overall concepts — each Lautner building is a unique design solution — but also in his use of materials, as Jean-Louis Cohen notes in his essay "John Lautner's Luxuriant Tectonics":
| “ | There is absolutely no dogma in Lautner's attitude to materials; as a result he never subordinates the design concept of his buildings to any rigid rule that would require the primacy of a single material in a project. Even where he demanded rigorous continuity and integrity, as with wood in the Walstrom House and concrete at Marbrisa ... he never allowed that to undermine the sense of structure and always took into account the need for a certain structural logic ... He was happy to bring together wood and concrete ... as he did in the Desert Hot Springs Motel ... to have cables meet concrete and plastic, as in the Tolstoy House, to carry a wooden roof on steel supports, as in the Garcia House, or, so evident in the Chemosphere, to allow three radically different materials to work with each other — a structure of laminated lumber to enclose the dwelling area, metal struts to carry it, those struts bolted onto the vertical concrete column that anchors the unit to the hill. | ” |
It is ironic that, although famous Lautner works like the Carling and Harpel houses, the Chemosphere and the Sheats Goldstein Residence have become inextricably linked with Los Angeles in the public imagination, Lautner repeatedly expressed his dislike of California. In his oral history interviews he was highly critical of the standard of architecture in Los Angeles, and idealised the rural Michigan environment of his youth, as he recalled in 1986:
| “ | My childhood, I had a hundred miles of beaches, private beaches, you know: no people, no nothing. I mean, just go swimming anywhere you want, and no problem. The coast here to me is just ugly, you know, it's crazy. Malibu is nothing to me, it's just crazy." ... Oh it was depressing. I mean, when I first drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, it was so ugly I was physically sick for the first year I was here. Because after living in Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin, mostly out in the country, and mostly with good architecture ... this was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen ... If you tried to figure out how to make a row of buildings ugly, you couldn't do it any better than it's been done . I mean they're just ugly, naturally ugly, all the way. There isn't a single, legitimate, good-looking thing anywhere. | ” |
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