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what Wright called “the horizontal line of freedom.” Describing his own prototype of a house for Broadacre in 1935, Lautner enunciated this “Democratic Vista,” the feeling of freedom that should imbue American architecture, and with it a program for the career to come: “The house unfolds out of the hills into a rhythmic light, free space…. The living room roof and ceiling pitches up, like one’s eyelash under a visor to the sky, leaving nothing but glass between you and the view…. At night you see the moon and stars instead of the walls of the room…. In the morning the sun comes all the way to the heart of the house to wake you.”

Lautner was as concerned with the modest home or the roadside diner as with the luxury retreat, seeking in every project the same generous “feeling of freedom.” As his work evolved, this led to an increasingly radical sense of continuity between the space he built and the world around it, and to a revolutionary fluency in how space was shaped. Indeed, Lautner’s first independent projects, completed immediately after his move to Los Angeles in 1938, were widely published as a model for the free-flowing open plan house of the future and, with the end of the war, he could begin to look at structural solutions that could liberate the space of the dwelling even more. The Carling House (1947) shows him reaching for an absolute continuity between interior spaces and between inside and out — in this case extending the logic so that an entire
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