This book includes a plain text version that is designed for high accessibility. To use this version please follow this link.
of the earth and its elements, “the sense of the whole” that can be perceived in a deep reading of the world around us. Fascinated from the start with color photography and film, he used the camera to probe the natural world more deeply, locating in its least tangible elements — clouds, ice floes, boulders, the mouths of caves, sheets of rock and water — the central relationships explored in his work: between stillness and motion, vista and shelter, solidity and evanescence, the rhythms of shaped space and the elemental form and pulse of the universe at large.

As a result, unlike the systematic and analytical process prevailing among European-trained modernists of the postwar era or their American adherents, Lautner’s spatial and structural thinking represented a modernism not built from logic but imagined of instinct and spirit. Drawing on the kind of sensibility developed by the Froebel kindergarten gifts – objects that presented archetypal concepts like symmetry and encouraged free, imaginative play — and on the Romantic primacy of instinct over reason, Lautner saw shapes and structures as an overarching whole, rather than an assembly. All Lautner’s adventures in structure, line, siting and materials start from there. They derived not from a quest for effect but from a search to reach the poetry of the everyday. They are grounded in his belief that any building could, through conversation with its setting, awaken emotional and sensory forces toward a transcendental understanding of its environment.

Lautner’s long apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in rural Wisconsin built his growing sense that architecture, as at Keepsake and Midgaard, could “grow the soul.” But Wright and Lautner — though one saw the other as his heir — were different. Where Mies van der Rohe and Wright, like carpenters or like children with building blocks, depended on the repetition of a ruling unit to govern a composition, Lautner approached buildings as a sculptor, like Hans Arp or Constantin Brancusi, imagining shapes and the space around them already complete. Devoid of reference to precedents or rules, eschewing all the conventions of the module, something revolutionary and distinctively American emerged: buildings shaped sinuously and uniquely to fit the felt logic of their circumstances, and growing from them, as he said, “like forms of nature.” These chambers of voids, either bounded by sweeping forms or breaking out of their containers altogether, seek an architecture in which the sublime becomes familiar and the familiar is made sublime.

Wright’s Taliesin community for most of Lautner’s time there was working on two fronts: the small single-family dwelling and the Broadacre plan for a city dispersed into the landscape on Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117
Produced with Yudu - www.yudu.com. Publish online for free with YUDU Freedom - www.yudufreedom.com.