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