John Lautner
Dissolving the Confines
By Nicholas Olsberg

It is said that the great subject of American culture is the contemplation of space, and that the truest model of an American artist is the rebellious idealist from the wilderness who works with stunning but unselfconscious originality. Growing up in the north woods, with contempt for academies and conventions, finding rules only in the laws of nature, and with absolute confidence that truth could emerge only from the force of his own imagination, the Los Angeles architect John Lautner (1911– 94) was an artist firmly in this native tradition. His great subject was the uncovering of space, and his work was a search for structures and shapes that would liberate that space to capture a sublime sense of spaciousness. Until very recently, the supple and sinuous results that came from this quest — fluid spaces and molded forms, buildings as archetypal shelter and buildings as transcendent vista — seemed extravagantly, even shockingly, original. Now, as architecture everywhere is moving into this sculptural territory, we are looking differently at those like Lautner who first took it past the orthodox systems and geometries of the International school toward a more luxuriant, emotive and fluent modernism. What once looked eccentric now seems pioneering; what once seemed self-indulgent now looks extraordinarily disciplined.

Lautner was raised in Marquette, Michigan, on the wooded shores of Lake Superior. His father was a professor of humanities, steeped in German Idealist philosophy. His mother was a painter with a wide interest in mystical and mythical views of nature and the universe, from Nordic folk beliefs to Sufi and Sanskrit poetry. Determined to raise their only son as a student both of “Nature” and of Idealist philosophy, they built a boldly austere wooden city house (Keepsake) for John to be born in. Unpainted, meeting the land without a threshold, the house was designed to educate Lautner to the virtues of simplicity, ground him in pioneer and Pilgrim traditions and surround him – beneath a gigantic sheltering roof — with symbolic furnishings and murals and the literature of aesthetics and ideas that would excite an original imagination. With Midgaard (1923-28), the summer cabin the family built together in the mid 1920s, the relationship of child to nature, and of nature to design, intensified. Lautner claimed that his boyhood experience building it – winching logs up from the shore, battening them together for its roof, truing his lines with the lake’s horizon — taught him “all I ever needed to know about architecture.” Drawing on Norwegian folk beliefs for its argument, Norse architecture for its design and decorated to suggest a transcendental relationship with the sky and stars, Midgaard was, for Lautner’s mother, “the rainbow bridge between earth and heaven.”

For Lautner, these childhood horizons, both natural and philosophical, led to a persistent fascination with the forms and auras