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