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and bridges wander; the concrete cover rises and falls. This shaping of the space appears almost accidental, but in fact manages a complicated set of relationships to views, structure, sunlight, moonlight, cooling breezes, privacy and topography with extraordinary precision. As a result, the commanding vistas stay true, drawing the eye and senses out from shelter toward the diaphanous light and vague geometries of the distant tropical seascape.

After seeing Marbrisa complete, Lautner believed that the house had liquefied its own boundaries, leaving the visitor both settled in place and transported into a “disappearing space.” That idea now led Lautner to explore the transcendent illusion of being freed from the structure one is within to inhabit the spaces beyond it. Exploring the contradictory psychology of enclosure and release, Lautner, in his last works, abandoned all distinctions between roof, wall and foundation to mold spaces like caves, shells or hollowed boulders, seeking the sense a dancer has of being simultaneously on the ground and in flight. “A snowdrift in winter and a grass mound in summer,” the Turner House (1982), in Aspen, Colorado, wrote Lautner, is “simply a concrete roof in the form of a small segment of a sphere.” That roof is carried far below ground, where its three point loads are tied together with concrete beams, so that the whole structure is braced from beneath. When the turf-clad roof is seen from a distance, the house appears to be a sliver of a gigantic underground sphere, breaking through the undulating crust of an alpine meadow to look up to the sheer face of the mountains. Lautner used the sloping ground to bring one into the house from the back, and then steeply up between curving walls into a panoramic living space that seems to swallow the light around it. The sense of emergence leaves the visitor feeling like a butterfly poised to fly from its chrysalis, capturing that balancing point between shelter and vista that is Lautner’s “middle ground”: the transcendent bridge between earth and heaven that marked Midgaard.

Like all of his late work, the Turner House reminds us that Lautner’s is rarely an architecture to look at. It is instead architecture to look out from, or to join with in its conversation with
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