by its continuity with the terrain, and which uses the play between open and closed, shelter and vista, angularity and curve, to cause light to dance through it, like sunshine traversing a clearing in the woods or notes tumbling off the strings of a violin.

Lautner’s most famous work, Chemosphere (1960), shapes another drum but releases itself from the topography altogether to settle on a pole. This was Lautner’s most ambitious attempt at demonstrating a repeatable standardized dwelling system, and it was heralded or scorned as a Space Age form in the press worldwide. In fact, Chemosphere was not only a reasonable solution to working on a 45-degree slope. It was also a workable economic model for the efficient living capsule of the future. Its focus on vista and enclosure moved far beyond the mechanistic visions of the “House of Tomorrow” that were appearing so widely to propose a more sympathetic relationship with the natural environment and a warmer domestic palette and language.

From the late ‘50s, Lautner began to discover the poetry of concrete, a material that could “express structure,” shifting its tones with changing light, carrying fluent lines, making space sinuous and yet conveying permanence and solidity. Concrete thus suggested how the house, in whatever material, might become an essay in shaping vistas. Both the scale of Lautner’s work and the scope of his conversation with nature expanded, as he moved his built forms into a dialogue with the sky, approaching them with cascading ramps, bordering them with an infinity pool, and shaping them with colliding catenary and parabolic curves, or with overlapping angles that stretch out to geometries that are never closed. At the Sheats House (1963), in concrete folded as sharply as origami, Lautner sliced a shelf on a Bel Air hill so that the house could rest on it, draping an elbow over the side and opening a gigantic mouth toward the distant horizon with its shimmering sense of the sea.

In Los Angeles, wilderness and city, slope and flatland, sublime horizons and banal streetscapes constantly collide. Lautner focused increasingly on the feeling of continuity enabled by extension into the natural site, geometric lines that seem to stretch into the topography, natural elements that are drawn into the structure, or — as in the Walstrom House (1969) — by carrying patterns of movement through built space into the surrounding natural environment. In this modest two-bedroom house on a steep slope, Lautner chose to build “in timber away from the mountainside.” The wooden frame rests on a concrete foundation at street level and on two anchor beams that slope into the hillside, allowing him to eliminate all retaining walls and leave a vertical clear space inside. By subtly twisting the diagonal geometries of wood and glass enclosing the