living floor, intimacy and vitality are added to the grandeur of the great open space, and its tilted ceiling disappears.

In the late 1960s, Lautner began to speak both of “drawing in” the elemental forces of the site — the geology of rocks, the geometries of topology, the geography of views and skies — and of shaping the building so that it “radiates” toward these forces. Ever freer forms emerged from this dramatic conversation between space within and space without. For Arthur Elrod, on a rocky spur above Palm Springs in 1968, Lautner excavated the lot eight feet into the boulders and sand, and used the geology thus revealed as part of the structure. The main space is sheltered by a huge circular roof of tilted concrete whose great blades rest on a concrete ring supported on a few slender metal posts. The result, as Lautner described it, is a sky-lit dome “with light slots for freedom and panorama, leaving the ceiling as a precise reflection of the roof above it.” Lautner darkened the floor so that the view of the mountainside through the window wall, especially at dusk and dawn, would glow like a movie.

Perched high above the sea, the Marbrisa villa in Acapulco (1973) brilliantly expresses Lautner’s feeling for structural continuity and spatial flow, and his faith in the capacity of concrete to reconcile freedom and flux with a sense of solidity and repose. The villa is a small portion of an inverted cone, whose structural rings are anchored against the cliff, but the main living space is an open deck. Bordered by a swimming channel and spilling out at its ocean side to a molded edge, this platform takes on an increasingly irregular form as it stretches out toward the sea. A vast flying canopy curves upwards to draw the breezes, shield the tropical sun and meet the sky. Pathways