wall, with its built-in seating, can be swung out into the open air. Applying ideas and materials from the aerospace industry, Lautner focused on loosening space by suspending roofs from posts or supporting them on trusses so that the supporting wall could be abandoned. With this, the house could now be shaped in totally original ways to fit its outlook or the habits of its owner, or to adapt to the exigencies and the geometries of its site.

As commissions took him into more spacious landscapes, Lautner focused on the experience of nature, echoing features of the topography to enhance a building’s relationship to its site, taming the vistas of these wilder sites and providing a feeling of stillness and shelter within them. For the Schaffer House (1949), amid an oak grove in suburban Montrose, a group of connected pavilions of redwood board and unmullioned glass settles under the trees, like a campground wandering through the woods. This radical use of routine materials domesticates the site: the long slats of wood mark out horizontal lines, while the strips of continuous sloping glass, capturing and refracting the sky, seem to stretch those angles out to the invisible edge of the woods.

The Pearlman Cabin (1956) is a weekend house designed for listening to music against the alpine landscape. The lot, offering only a narrow shelf of sloping land before hitting a gigantic boulder and falling steeply into the wooded canyon, presented a massive challenge. For an entire day, Lautner sat on the great rock, imagining a lightweight open cylinder taking shape around him: a circular platform for a floor, floating just above the boulder; a flat gray disk of a roof dropping gently over it; stripped tree trunks forming giant supporting posts; part of a sunburst, in a zigzag mitered wall of glass open to the view; and much of a moon, in a curving cave-like wall, set against the hillside and ending at a focal hearth. The deep facets of the window wall break up reflections inside to make the boundary between home and wilderness almost imperceptible, while the dark, cement-plastered wall behind serves, like a strong sheltering arm, to circle one’s shoulder as one leans toward the view. The result is a tiny retreat whose spaciousness is forged 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